A woman in Scotland can smell Parkinson’s disease on people. She first noticed it when he husband developed Parkinson’s. There was a change in his natural odor that no one else caught. When he was diagnosed, she put the two together.
In 2012, she was tested. She smelled shirts from patients and was asked to identify which ones had Parkinson’s. She only got one wrong. She said the person has the disease. He didn’t, yet. He got diagnosed 8 months later.
Still nobody knew exactly what she was smelling.
Then in 2019, molecules linked to Parkinson’s were found in skin swabs. And now they think what she smelled was a breakdown of certain oils by the condition. They’re looking further into it to see if a diagnosis can be reached much early in the disease.