Just run a cotton swab over someone’s back and a few minutes later you’ll know if that person has Parkinson’s. Scientists of the University of Manchester report good results this week on a super-fast Parkinson’s test. Remarkable: the inspiration came from a Scottish nurse who can smell the disease.
Years before her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, Joy Milne noticed that his smell was changing. She smelled a musky scent. Later, at a gathering of Parkinson’s patients, that smell was ubiquitous to her.
Scientists heard the story and decided to test her sense of smell by giving her T-shirts from Parkinson’s patients and healthy people. Milne picked out all Parkinson’s patients, writes The Guardian. From the healthy group, she also identified a person who was still healthy at the time, but she believed to have already had the disease – eight months later, that person was indeed diagnosed.
skin fat
The explanation lies, in addition to Milne’s particularly good sense of smell, in the production of sebum. This skin oil prevents dehydration and protects against infection by bacteria and fungi. Parkinson’s patients usually produce a lot of this skin fat, the scientists describe in The Journal of the American Chemical Society.
This changes the molecular makeup and some people can smell it. The British scientists developed a kind of electronic nose that can also pick up on these kinds of subtle changes. A so-called mass spectrometry monitors the weight of various fragments of molecules.
Bas Bloem, professor and Parkinson’s expert at Radboudumc, thinks the British results are promising. Doctors now diagnose Parkinson’s disease by looking for symptoms such as slowness, stiffness and tremors. But when patients are in that phase, they have had the disease for at least ten years, often struggling for years with complaints such as constipation, disturbed sleep or depression.
New test
Bloem: ‘They go into the hospital and leave the hospital, without doctors immediately thinking of Parkinson’s. An early diagnosis with such an electronic nose could help enormously in detecting the disease in time and treating people earlier with drugs that relieve symptoms or, as soon as they become available, can slow down the disease.’
That is where the major challenge for the new test lies. The British scientists conducted an experiment with 79 people already determined to have Parkinson’s disease, plus a control group of 71 healthy people. Bloem: ‘I am curious whether the test is also sensitive enough to pick up the disease at a much earlier stage. You would have to organize a new experiment for that, for example by following people who have not yet been diagnosed, but who do have a genetic predisposition to Parkinson’s.’
Every year in the Netherlands alone 52,000 people the diagnosis of Parkinson’s. The risk of the disease increases with age. Men are relatively more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than women.