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A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
- gabrielsroka 3y ago2020 Also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=A%20Woman%20Who%20Can%20Smell%20Parkinson&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- dang 3y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: A Woman Who Can Smell Parkinson's - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532937 - Nov 2019 (87 comments) A woman who can smell Parkinson's disease - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10434974 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10434974 - Oct 2015 (114 comments)
- se4u 3y agoThis discovery (if true) is as improbable and wonderful as luis pasteur and bacteria or fleming and penicilin
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BizarroLand 3y agoI would hate to have that ability. The temptation to use it as a curse would be too great. You spilled water on my shoe! sniff I curse your grandfather with dementia! And when grandad got dementia they would think of me and hate me and wonder if evil magic was real.
- genman 3y agoAre you a bad person then? I looks like this woman was able to put her ability into noble use. Why couldn't you?
- BizarroLand 3y agoYes, I am a terrible person because people can't seem to understand what might be construed as a "vague attempt at humor" as such. Jesus, laugh a little.
- genman 3y ago> Jesus, laugh a little. I did, but then I got worried about humanity.
- jbandela1 3y ago> But Joy's superpower is so unusual that researchers all over the world have started working with her and have discovered that she can identify several kinds of illnesses — tuberculosis, Alzheimer's disease, cancer and diabetes. The story for diagnosing Parkinson’s sounded plausible until this sentence. With Parkinson’s, you could imagine that she had some sort of sensitivity in her smell to a certain biomarker. Now with a plethora of vastly different diseases (even cancer is really a myriad of diseases grouped together), the suspicion of a confounder goes way up. Perhaps instead of diagnosing Parkinson’s, she is actually sensing some signal that indicates inflammation or some other distress signal. Or else people, prior to the manifestations of these diseases tend to make subtle, unconscious changes to their hygiene.
- patientzero 3y agoIf the goal is early diagnosis and the separate detections aren't getting confounded, why does it matter what parallel chain of causation leads to Parkinson in the patient and a correlating reading in the nose or other test? If no one in a normal state has the same mix of fear, anger and confusion and this leads to a microbial change around sweat glands, then that is a valid test of greater accuracy than many existing medical tests.
- cogman10 3y agoBut what if, for example, she's just sensitive to the smell of fecal matter and these people tend to have loser poops? Now is she detecting parkinson or is she detecting IBS or someone that ate something spicy or drank milk while being lactose intolerant. The issue is the one of the false positive and bayesian statistics. If she's detecting something that has a bunch of common causes then it's not really helpful to run a suite of tests to find an underlying problem on everyone that smells the same. A fever can be a sign of cancer, but it's also a sign of the flu. Should we check everyone with a fever for cancer?
- jondea 3y agoI'm not an expert, but a very quick search showed a meta analysis[1] which considers the false positives of using volatile biomarkers as a diagnosis. The original paper[2], of which Joy is co-author has a much smaller sample size, but also has a control group to measure false positives. Again, I'm not an expert, but from personal experience I know that Parkinson's can be hard to diagnose definitively until there are serious symptoms. This test may be relatively poor but still be useful as a piece of evidence. [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0303846723004389 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03038... [2]: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acscentsci.8b00879 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acscentsci.8b00879
- wolverine876 3y agoThey didn't mention looking for other people with the same ability. Maybe other or many or most people can do it, if they know what to look for. If I smell something bad, I never consider that it might be a disease.
- randcraw 3y agoIf a human can do it, a dog can too, since their noses are so much more sensitive than any human's. I can imagine dogs reliably sniffing out many diseases, then this becoming a standard lab assay, or at least a component thereof.
- nradov 3y agoWhen you feel sick, go get a "Lab" test.
- adityaathalye 3y agoAnd then do we query results with What's pup, doc??
- bobthepanda 3y agoAlso, assays cost less money than dogs which cost less money than human specialists.
- klyrs 3y agoIt seems safe to assume she has an especially good nose -- I figure she's the olfactory version of a tetrachromat[1] or supertaster[2]. She also had a relatively rare coincidence where she married somebody before his Parkinson's presented, and she witnessed its progression. I would assume that she isn't globally unique in her ability, but finding others with it is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem: how do you efficiently screen for this without knowing the precise compounds are to be targeted? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster
- strangattractor 3y agoThey appear to be training dogs to detect PD. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.01.23296924v1#:~:text=This%20trial%20supports%20previous%20findings,hard%20to%20diagnose%20PD%20cases https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.01.23296924v....
- dgan 3y agoAnecdote : i can totally smell when my testosterone level is high (under doping) because my feet's start emitting a (different than usual) disgusting smell. Definitely less useful than smelling Parkinson, but still kinda interesting ! Edit: might be related to all (or some) those different esters in sustanon
- jamestimmins 3y agoAccording this 2022 piece from the University of Manchester, it seems there have been some notable updates on the research. By using mass spectrometry, a technique that measures the weight of molecules, they have found that there are distinctive Parkinson’s markers in sebum – an oily substance secreted from the skin. This breakthrough has led them to develop a non-invasive swab test that can, in conjunction with the onset of early Parkinson’s symptoms, identify Parkinson’s disease with around a 95% accuracy. What’s even more astounding is the speed with which the test can return a result; around 3 minutes under lab conditions. https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/a-nose-to-diagnose-improving-parkinsons-diagnosis/ https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/a-nose-to-diagnos...
- opello 3y agoThat's pretty awesome! I was reading along and thinking to myself "why aren't we taking these tee-shirts to a mass spectrometer?!" I figured maybe mass spectroscopy wasn't quite the end all be all tool I was imagining. Since she could also smell TB, Alzheimer's, cancer, and diabetes it seems like those should be (especially cancer since dogs can smell some of that too) the next high value targets to determine the relevant smells.
- martynr 3y agoThis seems consistent with research from the University of Alabama that demonstrates substantial differences between Parkinsonian gut microbiome and control subjects- very plausible (IMO) that this might result in smell differences. The Alabama paper is open access and well worth reading if you’re interested in Parkinson’s https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/13280-new-study-puts-gut-microbiome-at-the-center-of-parkinson-s-disease-pathogenesis https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/13280-new-study-puts-...
- corpMaverick 3y agoI love this story. But every time I read it I wonder why we don't have electronic noses. Obviously dogs learn a lot by smelling. Why can't scientists have some. Am I too naive?
- NegativeLatency 3y agoThere's a lot of people working on similar things, I don't know much but it's pretty hard because the scope is large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_nose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_nose
- kashunstva 3y agoThere’s an association between seborrheic dermatitis and Parkinson’s. Seborrheic dermatitis gives a fairly distinct odour. It will be interesting to see whether she can detect PD among patients without extensive seb. derm.
- poulsbohemian 3y agoMy grandfather had Parkinson's and always had a distinctive smell... when this finding first came out oh, maybe a decade ago, I knew exactly what they were talking about. Had another friend in adulthood - yup, same smell, and yes she was found to have Parkinson's. I don't have a particularly great nose, but it's a super distinctive smell.
- x1sec 3y agoCould you describe the smell?
- poulsbohemian 3y agoEggplant overdrive. Woodsy musk. It’s not body odor smelling exactly, nor is it cologne-like. It just hangs on them. With Joanne (family friend) I remember how distinctive it was post-diagnosis and how it triggered the memory of my grandfather. She didn’t smell that way previously and so it was very noticeable that something had changed.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoHoly ^&*(!!!! I've always wondered why my grandfather smelled a certain way. Your comment made me realise that this was probably a side effect of Parkinsons.
- farhanhubble 3y agoIf a human can discern the scents so well can animals like dogs be trained to do the same and maybe much more?
- buro9 3y agoPeople with the common cold smell like dying flowers about 2-3 days before any symptoms appear. It took me until my 30s to discover other people didn't know/realise/detect this. But since I've shared it with people as an interesting party trick type thing I've found many people who could smell onset of a cold. It's not surprising to me that people can smell so much more, as all of our senses differ from person to person, the range, intensity, sensitivity. What does surprise me is turning that into a useful application that could be used by others without the same sensory capabilities, that's neat.
- dmichulke 3y agoHow do you do this socially? You're probably not sniffing random people to chat them up with "you'll have a cold in 3 days", right?
- buro9 3y agoNot random people, no, but it's a useful signal for "that person is probably contagious right now so I'll give them a wide berth". I have got into the habit of telling people close to me, and it gives them a chance not to avoid getting a cold, but to mitigate the impact by treating the symptoms before they've really emerged.
- Kuinox 3y agoIt was 4 years ago, is there any more news to this story ?
- masfoobar 3y agoThe first thing that came to mind when reading the title was to call James Randi for a $1 million dollar paranormal challenge.
- DrBazza 3y agoMy father had Parkinsons. And was an engineer that used degreaser, i.e. trichloroethylene. And had 'the smell'. I think it's actually more common for people to detect this smell than perhaps is implied by these articles. I suppose the lady in question was just the first to notice and bring it to the attention of the medical community. https://www.science.org/content/article/widely-used-chemical-strongly-linked-parkinson-s-disease https://www.science.org/content/article/widely-used-chemical...
- uslic001 3y agoI know several nurses that can smell C diff colitis infections. They also use dogs to find C diff infections.