A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020) (opens in new tab)

That'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.

That is not how i read that sentence.

It sounds like you are assuming that every one of those illneses smell the same to her. That is that she can tell that someone has Parkinson’s or tuberculosis, or Alzheimer's, or cancer or diabetes, but she can’t tell which one they have.

The way i read it is that she can identify which one people have based on how they smell. Totaly made up example: tuberculosis smells peppery, while Alzheimer minty, and so on and so on. (Admittedly this also assumes that the journalist was sloppy about cancer. Probably she was only tested on specific types of cancers. It is very unlikely that all cancers would smell the same. But this is something which is very easy to get jumbled up by the journalist.)

Ultimately it doesn’t matter. If it verifies through a properly designed test protocol they will publish a paper about it. If not, they won’t. So if it matters we will hear about it.

If you read the report OP linked, it says they did a blind test where she was given shirts that had been worn by a variety of people some of who had Parkinsons for differing length of time, and some who had not, and she was able to get them all, including what they though was a false positive until that person came back months later to say they had developed it (similar to how she's been able to smell it on her husband before he was symptomatic).

Why should she not be able to detect some kinds of cancers? Some dogs can.

In the end, all this should not be so difficult. Take the head space, then do MS of a bunch of people with these diseases and the head space and MS of healthy people as a comparison. The delta gives the disease.

I bet most (type 1) diabetics could smell other diabetics if they were trying. High blood sugar especially changes your body odor a ton. You sweat a lot more sugar for your skin bacteria to digest.

Not to discount the woman or the article, we should totally be researching this stuff

I read the article as saying she can tell them apart, not merely sorting them into healthy/sick.

And I wouldn't be surprised if things like "cancer" were actually a confounder (I'm thinking along the lines of detecting the body's reaction rather than the tumor itself)--but it's still useful information. They've already used her information to find a albeit imperfect test for Parkinsons. What if you had a similar test for cancer? It would tell the doctor to start looking in fashions they would not do for the general population.

If 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.

That might be just an imprecise formulation by the journalist.

Smelling tuberculosis seems plausible to me, it is a disease of the lungs.

General cancer probably no, but I have repeatedly read comments by oncologists that sarcoma, specifically, has a distinct smell.

Would it be so surprising if she just has an unusually adept sense of smell?

Advanced lung cancer has a strong, very distinctive smell.

Holy ^&*(!!!!

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.

Could you describe the smell?

How 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?

If 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.

It 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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

A Woman Who Can Smell Parkinson's - 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 - Oct 2015 (114 comments)

There'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

Are you a bad person then? I looks like this woman was able to put her ability into noble use. Why couldn't you?