Joy Milne, a 72-year-old retired nurse from Scotland, has the unique ability to smell Parkinson’s disease.
Milne’s incredible sense of smell comes from hereditary hyperosmia, a condition that makes one extremely sensitive to smell. According to The New York Times, Milne attributes the condition to her mother’s side of the family, as her grandma had the same super-smelling abilities. Her grandma taught her how to fine-tune her sense of smell by having Milne identify different kinds of roses.
Les Milne, Joy’s late husband, suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years before passing away in 2015. About 15 years before he was diagnosed, Joy Milne noticed her husband’s smell change to a disagreeable musky odor, and a change in his behavior coincided with the change in his smell.
When taking her husband to a meeting of local Parkinson’s patients and their caregivers in Perth, Scotland, where they lived, Milne noticed that the other patients smelled exactly like her husband. Joy Milne immediately noticed that the unpleasant musky odor her husband had been giving off for more than two decades at this point was Parkinson’s disease.
After realizing the connection between the musky odor and Parkinson’s disease, Milne and her husband searched for a scientist willing to conduct research. They found Tilo Kunath, a senior research fellow at Edinburgh University who focuses on Parkinson’s disease. They met Kunath in 2012 at an event organized by the research and support charity Parkinson’s UK, where he gave a talk.
Joy Milne’s nose leads to groundbreaking research
Kunath and University of Manchester chemist Perdita Barran teamed up to research Joy Milne’s sense of smell. They focused on confirming whether Milne could smell Parksinson’s disease and, if so, what chemicals she smells to identify the disease.
If they found the specific molecules related to Parkinson’s disease that her nose detects, the research could lead to a new diagnosis standard for the disease, whose criteria haven’t changed in over 200 years. The current diagnosis criteria identify the disease through physical symptoms, which only appear years after a patient develops it and it has already significantly damaged their neurons.
After confirming her smell capabilities, the researchers found that she smelled specific molecules in sebum, the oil humans excrete from skin glands to moisturize it. They discovered that eicosane, octadecanal, hippuric acid, and perillic aldehyde were the chemicals Milne could smell, and they found that these four molecules were at significantly abnormal levels in Parkinson’s disease patients compared to healthy individuals.
Following that groundbreaking study, Barran and her team recently developed a new test for Parkinson’s that, if found viable through more research, could change the diagnosis procedure for the disease. Their research has been promising thus far, and they have found that by using a skin swab to collect sebum and putting it through a paper spray, they can successfully identify the lipids against a control.
Joy Milne’s nose has significantly advanced research into Parkinson’s disease. If researchers work to develop a new form of diagnosis that can identify the disease earlier, it could change the quality of life for those diagnosed with the awful neurodegenerative disease.
