You may not recognize her by name, but you’ve likely heard her story. Joy Milne has an incredibly unique talent: detecting Parkinson’s disease through her sense of smell. Her gift came to light when she detected what she describes as an “overpowering sort of nasty yeast smell” in her husband of ten years. Soon noticing other differences in her husband, such as personality and mood changes, he finally sought medical attention, and received a Parkinson’s diagnosis.
Later, upon walking into a Parkinson’s support group meeting, that same smell permeated the room – although apparently only Joy was able to detect it. In fact, she was even able to pick up on varying degrees of the smell – some whose scent was faint, while for others, it was much stronger. With both her own and her husband’s medical backgrounds (she a nurse and he a doctor), this discovery was clearly significant and warranted further action.
Her story led her to assist Tilo Kunath, a Parkinson’s disease researcher at the University of Edinburgh, with the goal of developing a tool to provide earlier detection – and ultimately, treatment – of Parkinson’s.
Although at first skeptical of the possibility of Parkinson’s being detected through scent, he was open to further exploration after learning about the success dogs were having in picking up on the scent of cancer in patients. He then devised a way to test her abilities, by providing her with a random selection of t-shirts – half of which had been worn by someone clinically diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and half by those without the disease – and, her accuracy rate was astounding. In fact, she missed the mark on only one of the t-shirts, worn by someone without Parkinson’s, but who in fact later received a Parkinson’s diagnosis as well.
Kunath explains, “Imagine a society where you could detect such a devastating condition before it’s causing problems and then prevent the problems from even occurring.” Dr. Thomas Hummel of the Technical University of Dresden’s Smell & Taste Clinic, adds that while the idea is fascinating, there are still a number of questions to first address.
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