Joy Milne is known with many titles.
She’s a grandmother, a former nurse and also a “super smeller,” according to researchers and scientific journals.
The 68-year-old, from Scotland, said that she’s always noticed when her patients’ smell would change during her years as a nurse.
“They say [my nose is] somewhere between a dog and a human. And I take that as a compliment,” Milne said on the Today show.
Her sense of smell was first to notice, many years ago. She thought something was wrong with her husband. All of a sudden he started smelling off.
“He was only 31, going on 32, it was that summer. I thought, well, I’m not going to nag about this,” she said.
At the age of 45, her husband was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It is the neurological disorder causes tremors, slowed movement and balance problems, among other symptoms, and eventually leads to dementia.
After his diagnosis, Milne and her husband attended a Parkinson’s support group meeting, where she said she was overwhelmed by the scent.
“I said look, everybody else in that room with Parkinson’s has the same smell like you,” she recalled. “And he just went, ‘What, what on earth are you talking about?’ ”
Milne’s ability to smell and detect disease eventually led her to Dr. Perdita Barran, a professor of biotechnology at the University of Manchester. Barran was not sure if Milne could detect Parkinson’s patients with the smell, so she set up a test.
“We got some people with Parkinson’s, six people, and we got six people without Parkinson’s and we bought them identical t-shirts and they wore them overnight,” Barran explained to Today.
But Milne identifies all the six Parkinson’s patients correctly by the scent on their shirts, plus one person in the control group, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s nine months later.
“That was transformative,” Barran said. “Now, some other person had it before they were clinically diagnosed.”
Barran and researchers said, that Milne’s ability could help them a lot to identify Parkinson’s patients long before they’re diagnosed. Doctors can start treatment early and slow the disorder’s symptoms.
“We can tell, within about half an hour, from a patient sample, just a swab, whether someone has Parkinson’s or not,” Barran said.
Milne’s husband died four years ago, but she said he would be “over the moon” to hear how she’s using her abilities to help other people.
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