| A 69-year-old Scottish woman named Joy Milne can smell Parkinson's disease. She discovered this ability through tragedy, sensing the changes in the body odor of her husband, Leslie. His scent — what Milne told the German magazine Der Spiegel had been a "strong, masculine, musky smell" — developed into a strangely fatty odor. But it wasn't until years after his diagnosis, when the couple attended a meeting for patients with Parkinson's in a church, that Milne realized what she had been sensing. A Der Spiegel profile of Milne, published Tuesday, describes the moment: "When they arrived, around two dozen patients were already seated in the room. And every single one of them smelled like Les." Of our senses, smell often gets the short end of the stick. But our noses are more powerful than many realize. A study at the University of California at Berkeley, published in 2007 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, offered experimental evidence that humans can track by scent alone. Students, their other senses dulled by blindfolds, earplugs and gloves, pressed their noses into a grass field. A 30-foot string soaked in chocolate oil ran through the grass. Guided only by their nostrils, 21 of 32 test subjects followed the string. As Rutgers University psychologist John McGann told me a few years ago: "It's pretty hard to find two odors that people can't discriminate." (He spent a good deal of time trying to do just that.) Dogs deserve their reputation as great smellers, but we're equally as adept as they are at sniffing certain smells, such as the banana-like aroma of amyl acetate. Even among good smellers, Milne is exceptional. She is a "hyperosmic individual," a.k.a. a super-smeller, as a group of chemists behind a March study wrote. That work, published in the American Chemical Society's Central Science journal, identified the specific volatile chemicals that patients with Parkinson's emit and Milne can smell. Based on that research, Der Spiegel reports, scientists are developing a machine (an "electronic nose") that recognizes the smelly signature as a possible early detection tool for the disease. |
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