Sniffing for Parkinson’s

People with Parkinson’s disease give off a distinctive odor years before their symptoms appear. This discovery was made by a woman who noticed a “woody, musky odor” emanating from her husband twelve years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She didn’t make the connection until, when attending a support group, she noticed the smell on others in the group. They, also, gave off an odor she could detect. (The woman attributes her keen sense of smell to synesthesia.)

The woman, a nurse, mentioned this phenomenon to a neurobiologist who verified that the woman could indeed distinguish people with Parkinson’s based on their scent. First, researchers tested her sense of smell by asking her to classify 12 shirts worn by a mixture of healthy individuals and patients diagnosed with the disease. The results were impressive: Not only did she identify all six of the shirts belonging to Parkinson’s patients, she also picked out a shirt worn by a test subject who wasn’t diagnosed with Parkinson’s until eight months after the experiment.

For further verification, the research team swabbed the upper backs of 64 people to collect sebum, the oily substance that keeps our skin moisturized. Forty-three of these people had Parkinson’s and 21 were healthy. After analyzing the chemical makeup of the samples, they noticed that four of the chemicals in the Parkinson’s patients were in higher concentrations than those of the healthy people and that one chemical was lower.

It looks like scientists may be on the verge of early detection of Parkinson’s by swabbing the skin and analyzing the chemicals. In the meantime, sharpen your sense of smell and see what you might discover!

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