Scottish Joy Milne created 2015 with extraordinary talent Addresses: It has the ability to smell Parkinson’s disease. of progressive neurodegenerative disease found in the United States alone Nearly a million people Affected, about 400,000 live with her in Germany. Since Milne showed that she’s worried It can be recognized by its smellResearchers from Great Britain are searching for the molecules that give the disease its special odor imprint. Now the team has identified a number of disease-specific molecules and developed a simple skin swab test to detect them.
Milne also owes her soft nose to a disease: the 72-year-old retired nurse from Perth suffers from hereditary hyperosmia, a disorder of the senses that makes people more sensitive to smells. Eventually, she noticed that her husband was starting to smell musk – a scent she hadn’t noticed on him before. When he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease many years later, she linked the change in smell to the disease. Her husband passed away in 2015.
In 2012, Milne met neurologist Tilo Konath at an event hosted by the UK charity Parkinson’s Research. Konath did research at the University of Edinburgh and was initially skeptical. Nevertheless, he and his colleagues decided to test Milne’s claims. They gave her 12 T-shirts, six from Parkinson’s patients and six from healthy people. In all six cases, the nurse correctly identified the disease – although at first it seemed she was wrong about one person, she was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease within a year.
Why does the smell of people with Parkinson’s disease differ?
Konath, chemist Perdita Baran of the University of Manchester in England, and colleagues set out to search for the molecules responsible for this change in body odor. The researchers used mass spectrometry to identify the molecules in sebum, the oily substance found on the surface of the skin. discovered in Parkinson’s patients Changes in fat moleculesthe so-called fat.
In September 2022, the group reported In the “JACS Au” Journal of the American Chemical Society About their latest study: With a simple test with a skin swab, the scientists succeeded in detecting the fatty fingerprint that indicates Parkinson’s disease. By comparing fat samples from 79 people with Parkinson’s disease and 71 people without Parkinson’s disease, they identified a number of large fats that can be identified in minutes using a special type of mass spectrometry.
How reliable is a skin swab test?
“I think it’s a promising group of biomarkers,” says Blaine Roberts, a biochemist at Emory University who was not involved in the work. However, it is still not clear how accurate this test is. While the group reported the detailed chemical profile of the unique signature of Parkinson’s disease, they did not comment on the accuracy of the test. According to study author Baran, it should be able to determine whether a person has Parkinson’s disease with more than 90 percent accuracy, according to data that has not yet been published.
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