Parkinson’s fragrance TTELA

People with Alzheimer’s scent have “rye bread”, diabetics have a “sweet nail polish” and TB has a “wet card” scent. A retired nurse from Scotland contributes her practical knowledge to research – she knows the smell of diseases.

As a nurse, Joy Milne cares for thousands of people. After all, she smells of Parkinson’s disease – the strong smell of musk. Her husband and mother both died of Parkinson’s disease and both took care of her.

When she closes her eyes, she also senses the smell of colors. This is called “synesthesia”. The coffee smelled like “rotating gray” to her, the North Sea “emerald green” and her husband “dark purple”. That is, until he gets more brown tones on her nose and starts to stink. Ten years later, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. When they started going to meetings for Parkinson’s patients, she realized why her husband had changed the smell – these patients all smell the same!

When science began to ask her out in 2012, they conducted an experiment that gave her twelve T-shirts. Six of them were taken by Parkinson’s patients and six by the undiagnosed. Can Joy identify these with her sense of smell? She concluded that there were seven people with Parkinson’s disease and five without. It turned out later that Joy was not at fault, but was diagnosed seven or eight months later. She had shown that she could smell the disease before it was even diagnosed!

Now it was in a hurry for research. Because Parkinson’s disease is unpredictable today. There is a unique collaboration going on between research groups and patients, for which Dr. Dilo Gunath received the prestigious Tom Isaacs Award in 2019. With Join’s experiential knowledge, researchers in the UK are trying to develop methods to predict the disease. Will you succeed? The quality of life and the lives of millions of people depend on it.

For me, this is a clear example of need Work-integrated learning, University West Profile – Combine practical and theoretical knowledge. It is trying to make the impossible possible. As the physicist Niels Porce puts it, “crazy enough” – even if there is only a minimal chance of success, you should take risks in research. That’s why “crazy enough” is one of the key words in University West. We need to encourage ourselves to think outside the box. As Dr. Joy Milne said about Dr. Gunath, he really “showed the scientific ‘out of the box’ mind of a real researcher.