One Woman Can Smell Parkinson's Disease Before Symptoms Manifest (npr.org) 64
"For most of her life, Joy Milne had a superpower that she was totally oblivious to," reports NPR. Long-time Slashdot reader doug141 explains what happened next:
Milne's husband's natural odor changed when he was 31. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's at 45. When Joy walked into a Parkinson's support group, she smelled the same odor on everybody. A Parkinson's researcher tested her with blind samples from early stage patients, late-stage patients, and controls...
NPR tells the story of that test, which took place at the University of Edinburgh with a Parkinson's researcher named Tilo Kunath: [O]ut of all the samples, Joy made only one mistake. She identified a man in the control group, the group without Parkinson's, as having the disease. But many months later, Kunath says, that man actually approached him at an event and said, "Tilo, you're going to have to put me in the Parkinson's pile because I've just been diagnosed."
It was incontrovertible: Joy not only could smell Parkinson's but could smell it even in the absence of its typical medical presentation.
Kunath and fellow scientists published their work in ACS Central Science in March 2019, listing Joy as a co-author. Their research identified certain specific compounds that may contribute to the smell that Joy noticed on her husband and other Parkinson's patients. Joy and her super smelling abilities have opened up a whole new realm of research, Kunath says... 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.
Kunath says the ultimate goal is developing a new tool that can detect detect Parkinson's early. "Imagine a society where you could detect such a devastating condition before it's causing problems and then prevent the problems from even occurring."
NPR tells the story of that test, which took place at the University of Edinburgh with a Parkinson's researcher named Tilo Kunath: [O]ut of all the samples, Joy made only one mistake. She identified a man in the control group, the group without Parkinson's, as having the disease. But many months later, Kunath says, that man actually approached him at an event and said, "Tilo, you're going to have to put me in the Parkinson's pile because I've just been diagnosed."
It was incontrovertible: Joy not only could smell Parkinson's but could smell it even in the absence of its typical medical presentation.
Kunath and fellow scientists published their work in ACS Central Science in March 2019, listing Joy as a co-author. Their research identified certain specific compounds that may contribute to the smell that Joy noticed on her husband and other Parkinson's patients. Joy and her super smelling abilities have opened up a whole new realm of research, Kunath says... 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.
Kunath says the ultimate goal is developing a new tool that can detect detect Parkinson's early. "Imagine a society where you could detect such a devastating condition before it's causing problems and then prevent the problems from even occurring."
Wow - this is old news... (Score:4, Informative)
Even by Slashdot standards - this is ooooolllllldddd news
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-... [bbc.co.uk]
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Ya know, I could swear I'd heard about it even before that.. But I have a poor sense of time, so maybe it's only that old.. It really does seem like *forever* ago that I read about this first.
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I can smell when my coworker has had beer and tuna for dinner the previous day. It usually comes and goes, there's an overpowering sense of it and then after a few minutes the air clears again.
Mind you other people can smell it too, usually accompanied by comments like "aw geeze Paul, couldn't you take that outside?".
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I'll bet dogs could also easily be trained to smell parkinsons and a ton of other diseases, maybe even covid-19! ... Covid-19 guard dogs!!! Dogs are seriously under-utilised, I bet they could also smell food that would give us food poisoning too. Or tell me when the bloody pears are of perfect ripeness because I can never tell.
Why aren't we doing this training?
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Cost of a COVID-19 test, > $10 dollars and very slow.
Cost of getting a dog to smell someone, quick and free.
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One year and nine days old news, to be exact.
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I've noticed that this seems to be a sort of coronavirus effect. Old stories, historical stories, and other stuff that can be written without research that requires physically interacting with the world is all over the place.
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I've noticed that YouTube's algorithm has had a sudden change in what it thinks I want to see. It's old stuff that's been around for a while on youtube, but I think it's move up because it doesn't have any of my normal new content to show.
Mind you, I really don't mind seeing Robin Williams on Johnny Carson/Tonight Show... or Andy Kaufman, but definitely not what it would have dug up for me a few weeks ago.
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The algorithm includes things that are popular with other people who watch the same things you do, so since more people are watching videos, but the rate of video production is likely normal or even low, the older videos will get a lot of new views and start trending again.
The algorithm didn't change what it thinks you want to see, it only changed what it thinks people who watch the stuff you watch are watching. And it is right.
the peer review is new (Score:5, Informative)
Given the range of stuff that's posted here, this definitely rates a slot.
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Yeah.. I haven't looked at the recent stuff, but the "very likely a real thing" wasn't really an issue before. I remember that she could identify correctly something like 48 out of 50 times. I'm glad for you that you believe its real because it's in a specific journal, but the stuff I saw long ago presented the evidence (and methodology) and it was from a very reputable source. OK, hell, this is so old, it had trickled down to youtube well over a year ago.. It seems that the BBC thing was even a bit old
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Oh oops.. It was actually 49/50 according to this video, but it seems to be the case that this year+ old video had outdated information in it at the time, and the one person that had been counted as a false positive was later diagnosed (8 months later.. seriously old news!) as having Parkinson's, making her tested accuracy 100%.
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Given that dogs can be trained to smell for low blood sugar conditions and for cancer, it's not that surprising that random humans can do so as well.
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Good grief, people, this story is important enough to run more than once, unlike a lot of other crap.
Not everyone in the world reads news for a living and remembers every headline they have ever seen. I follow the news comprehensive at times, but then a big project flares up and I missing everything for weeks or months at a time.
"Oh, don't you remember? I told you about my potentially lethal peanut allergy ages ago."
Forward error correction in the real world. It's A Good Thing.
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In my perspective, we should be finding people like her every day, we just don't have a rigorous research society that want to find this.
I cite my view after enjoying a few episodes of that Stan Lee show a few years back. besides the people that were flexible, 1 case stood out for me, the guy that could run for a very long time because his body does not produce a specific hormone or acid when the body process fat cells to energy cell ( or something like that ). the guy could run 50 to 100 miles without any
Re: Wow - this is old news... (Score:5, Funny)
You can smell old posts!
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the question remains : how reliable is mediabiasfactcheck [mediabiasfactcheck.com]
Overall, we rate NPR (National Public Radio) Left-Center Biased based on story selection that leans slightly left and Very High for factual reporting due to thorough sourcing and very accurate news reporting.
assuming factcheck is a reliable source i think the second part is mo
I have the same power! (Score:2, Insightful)
When Trump talks about something, I smell bullshit!
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Yes yes, Pol-pot was a right-winger too.
A new tool (Score:2, Insightful)
Like, train a dog.
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Please, dogs can't be trains. Nor planes, for that matter.
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Mush! Mush! Mush!
Ok, now put on the Rudolf nose and I'll sing.
Don't you just love social isolation?! Speak! Speak!
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dogs can't be trains
Oh yeah? [wikimedia.org]
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That's obviously Santa and his reindeers.
Re:A new tool (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand they're training giant rats in India. They have a better sense of smell than a dog, and can be trained in a fraction of the time. As I recall they're actually on-par or a little better at diagnosing many diseases than a doctor examining a relevant biopsy. I believe they use them to sniff out abandoned explosive mines as well - they're light enough that they probably won't set off the mine - and if they do, a new rat can be trained quickly.
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The same way dogs are trained to detect any smell that isn't isolated.
The same type of sample set they used to treat this lady, with a positive reinforcement whenever it's a positive sample. Dogs will look for the commonality.
They're doing the same thing with citrus greening disease right now in Florida. No isolation of known compounds necessary, just known positives and negatives.
https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-... [usda.gov]
What about other diseases? (Score:1)
Has her sense of smell been tried out on other diseases that have been detected by bloodhounds (malaria, diabetes, certain cancers), or is it focused on substances specific to Parkinson's?
Idiot! IDIOT! (Score:1)
Has her sense of smell been tried out on other diseases that have been detected by bloodhounds (malaria, diabetes, certain cancers), or is it focused on substances specific to Parkinson's?
You can't be bothered to read to the end of the article, where it lists some other diseases that her sense of smell has been tried out on? You just have to blather smugly on Slashdot, trying to make others believe you are smart?
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You can't be bothered to read to the end of the article, where it lists some other diseases that her sense of smell has been tried out on? You just have to blather smugly on Slashdot, trying to make others believe you are smart?
WTF dude, this is slashdot. We're only supposed to read the summary and complain about how it isn't really news for nerds.
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Woah, stop it right there. I thought we agreed we'd only read the clickbait titles from now on?
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I advise against reading the summary directly, you should scan it for keywords first.
Neat, but not sufficient (Score:3)
Imagine a society where you could detect such a devastating condition before it's causing problems and then prevent the problems from even occurring.
The latter doesn't follow from the former. Both my mom and dad have serious medical conditions, but even though we know we can't keep the illness from progressing further.
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Imagine a society where you could detect such a devastating condition before it's causing problems and then prevent the problems from even occurring.
The latter doesn't follow from the former. Both my mom and dad have serious medical conditions, but even though we know, we can't keep the illness from progressing further.
Yes, that's the big problem with something like Parkinsons. Even if you developed a test that can detect the disease years before any symptoms occur . . . . so what?
There is nothing that can cure Parkinsons, so the only thing that your test does is allow you to tell a person, "You have a disease and it's going to kill you at some time in the future". And what about false positives? What if you tell someone that they are going to develop Parkinsons in the future, and since Parkinsons is currently incurabl
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We don't have a cure, but I'm pretty sure they have drugs that slow the progress of the disease. Combine those with the ability to detect the disease before there's any obvious symptoms, and you could postpone your decline dramatically.
>What if you tell someone that they are going to develop Parkinsons in the future, and since Parkinsons is currently incurable they commit suicide.
In that case, you might want to be really careful not to let them know about these things they call "aging" and "mortality".
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Taxes are a recent addition, and more of a guarantee that comes with government rather than life.
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Hi, While what you say is correct. I think the advantages of this,
even with false positives within the group, is the possibility to find
when, where or how it happens. What event need to take place
in order for the disease to rapidly grow.
Also, which is most likely sci-fi in my head, reprogramming the
DNA or RNA or whatever needs to have a switch turned on or
off.
what is going to be interesting is the newer age related disease
once we start elongating out life span.
I make the habit of squatting 10 time every bre
Oscar the cat (Score:3, Interesting)
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A related story is that of Oscar the cat who could smell when someone in an old folks home was near death [cbsnews.com].
Can we send this cat to Congress and the White House -- asking for 327.2 million friends. :-)
Re:Oscar the cat (Score:5, Funny)
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Can she smell Alzheimers? (Score:2)
She should smell Joe Biden then. Although usually he's the one doing the smelling.
I can't smell Parkinson's (Score:4, Funny)
But I can usually tell if the person in front of me is a sysadmin.
What? (Score:2)
Early detection, by itself, won't help us cure Parkinson's since, thanks to dismal funding on basic research, we know very little about how to reverse or halt it.
So when it comes to Parkinson's... (Score:2)
Genes dealt it, she smelt it.
Some anecdotal evidence ... (Score:2)
The iconic picture during the famine in Somalia of a fat vulture and an emaciated pathetic little child on death bed made one think, why is it waiting for the baby to die, and how would it know? Can vultures smell the diff between life and death?
This exists. (Score:2)
There are beagles trained to react to cancer. I know a doctor who can smell certain diseases. He doesn't tell anyone but his regular diagnosis have always added up.
It's definitively an effect that is known. Peer review studies on this are good. Even more so if they confirm the effect. Nice. Interesting too.
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Gut Bacteria (Score:2)
Obvious takaway (Score:2)
dogs (Score:2)
if a human can smell it, dogs most certainly should be able to.
much like drugs sniffing dogs, they could be trained to detect these different types of diseases.