Some people have hyperosmia, that is to say they have an overdeveloped sense of smell, which would allow them to sense the presence of certain diseases.
- A 69-year-old Scottish woman detected the presence of Parkinson’s on her husband thanks to the change in his smell.
- Researchers are working to understand the mechanism of odor transformation by diseases.
- This would be due to the disruption of our metabolic system.
Many diseases give off a particular smell, often unpleasant. For example, diabetes can make urine smell like rotten apples, typhoid fever makes the body smell like baked bread, and yellow fever reportedly makes skin smell like a butcher’s shop, notes National Geographic. A few years ago, a 69-year-old Scottish woman, Joy Milne, who had hyperosmia, which refers to an overdeveloped sense of smell, helped science with her ability to detect Parkinson’s by smelling a person’s t-shirt.
A slightly woody, musky smell
This ability to be able to sense the presence of a disease could even concern anyone with a functional sense of smell. In any case, this is what Valerie Curtis, researcher in public health at the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London, believes and defends. “Signs of diseases are among the things that disgust people the mostshe assures National Geographic. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that we use our noses to detect disease.”
The reason illnesses give off an odor is that they disrupt our metabolic system. However, the latter is responsible, through the microbes present in the intestine and on our skin, for our olfactory signature. This is how Joy Milne detected a change in the smell of her husband a few years ago. She noticed that he gave off an odor”a little woody, musky“, she described to the Telegram in 2019. After convincing him to consult, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.-
A patient detected by sniff before the official diagnosis
Researchers have been interested in this olfactory ability and its medical use. During an experiment in a room where there were many patients with Parkinson’s, she realized that all people suffering from the disease smelled this same smell. In another experiment, this time blind, she had to spot six sweaty t-shirts of patients diagnosed with this disease compared to those of six other healthy controls. She managed to point to all people with Parkinson’s, adding a T-shirt of a healthy person. But the story does not end there since eight months later, he ended up being diagnosed in turn with Parkinson’s!
The researchers then focused their research on the chemical determination of the smell of Parkinson’s. These scientists from the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology managed to collect more than eight hundred samples of sebum, an oily substance secreted by the skin, taken from the backs of several volunteers. They discovered the presence of several molecules that together could generate a characteristic fingerprint to diagnose the disease. Now, they have to discover how this condition triggers the production of these molecules in the body and from when the smell appears.
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