A woman who can smell Parkinson’s disease has described the moment she realised her husband had it.
Joy Milne told Sky’s The UK Tonight With Sarah-Jane Mee about how her rare condition of hyperosmia, an incredibly sensitive sense of smell, helped her sniff out the disease in her late husband, Les.
She said: “Well, when you know, you’re saying to your husband ‘well you’re smelling, you’re not having enough showers and you’re not brushing your teeth enough’ and various other things, it doesn’t go down well to start off with does it?”
“We continued like that for a while, and then I thought I’ve got to stop this, he’s not terribly pleased, I’ll just have to keep quiet.”
But when Mr Milne was around 29 years old “there was a definite change, a very distinct change,” she said.
And by the time he was 31 “his smell had completely changed” and other things had “begun to happen”, leading her to think “maybe he had a brain tumour”.
A neurologist eventually diagnosed Mr Milne with Parkinson’s.
Joy and Les Milne
Ms Milne said she later went to a Parkinson’s meeting in Perth, Scotland, and noticed “by the time I left, I could tell you who had Parkinson’s, who did and who didn’t”.
“Now, there were over 30 people there. And, you know, I was quite able to do that.”
She described her ability to Dr Tilo Kunath from Edinburgh University, who worked with Perdita Barran, professor of mass spectrometry at the University of Manchester, to devise an experiment to test Ms Milne’s ability.
Joy Milne
Professor Barran told Sky News: “We had to do an experiment to separate the obvious movement symptoms of people with Parkinson’s disease from the smell.”
They had people wear T-shirts and then put the T-shirts in bags, which were given to…
