<story><title>A woman who can smell Parkinson&apos;s is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/820274501/her-incredible-sense-of-smell-is-helping-scientists-find-new-ways-to-diagnose-di</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jamestimmins</author><text>According this 2022 piece from the University of Manchester, it seems there have been some notable updates on the research.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;By using mass spectrometry, a technique that measures the weight of molecules, they have found that there are distinctive Parkinson’s markers in sebum – an oily substance secreted from the skin.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;This breakthrough has led them to develop a non-invasive swab test that can, in conjunction with the onset of early Parkinson’s symptoms, identify Parkinson’s disease with around a 95% accuracy. What’s even more astounding is the speed with which the test can return a result; around 3 minutes under lab conditions.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.manchester.ac.uk&amp;#x2F;discover&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;a-nose-to-diagnose-improving-parkinsons-diagnosis&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.manchester.ac.uk&amp;#x2F;discover&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;a-nose-to-diagnos...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>A woman who can smell Parkinson&apos;s is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)</title><url>https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/03/23/820274501/her-incredible-sense-of-smell-is-helping-scientists-find-new-ways-to-diagnose-di</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jbandela1</author><text>&amp;gt; But Joy&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s disease, cancer and diabetes.&lt;p&gt;The story for diagnosing Parkinson’s sounded plausible until this sentence. With Parkinson’s, you could imagine that she had some sort of sensitivity in her smell to a certain biomarker.&lt;p&gt;Now with a plethora of vastly different diseases (even cancer is really a myriad of diseases grouped together), the suspicion of a confounder goes way up.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps instead of diagnosing Parkinson’s, she is actually sensing some signal that indicates inflammation or some other distress signal.&lt;p&gt;Or else people, prior to the manifestations of these diseases tend to make subtle, unconscious changes to their hygiene.</text></comment>