PEOPLE – A woman who can smell Parkinson’s disease is using her hyperosmia — an enhanced sense of smell — to help diagnose the degenerative disease early as part of a study funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
Joy Milne, a former nurse, claims that illnesses all smelled different to her. “I would know if someone’s diabetes was going off,” she told UK-based newspaper The Telegraph.
“I could tell if someone was struggling post-operatively. The big one was walking into a Nightingale ward with 18 beds on it and smelling tuberculosis,” Milne, now 75, said. “It’s not musky like Parkinson’s. It’s more of an oily biscuit smell.”
Her late husband, Les, was 28 when Milne noticed he smelled different. Seventeen years later, when he was 45, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative nervous system disorder that impacts movement. As the Mayo Clinic explains, there is no cure, but surgery and treatments can help symptoms.
Milne accompanied her husband — who died in 2015 — to a support group and caught a whiff of the inside of someone’s coat. That’s when, she told the outlet, it “hit me.” She could smell Parkinson’s disease.
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The couple reached out to professionals to find out how Milne’s ability could be put to beneficial use. In 2013, her skills were put to the test with Professor Perdita Barran.
She was given T-shirts that had been worn by someone with Parkinson’s disease, along with shirts that were worn by people who weren’t ill.
Milne guessed every single shirt correctly, except for one — and that T-shirt belonged to someone who was later diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Milne and Barran, now at the UK’s University of Manchester, are working on a test to diagnose Parkinson’s early — and Barran says she’s “very close” …