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Who "nose" what your neurobiology toolkit holds?
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a chronic progressive neurological disorder that largely affects movement. There is currently no diagnostic test. Trivedi et al. collected sebum[*] samples from PD patients and unaffected volunteers to identify volatile metabolites that may serve as PD biomarkers. The research team included a woman with a sensitive sense of smell who reported to be able to detect PD by odor. In blinded studies, she identified the "musky" samples that belonged to the PD patients with high accuracy, which guided mass spectrometry to identify the volatile compounds that constituted a signature PD scent. These studies may pave the way for development of the first PD-specific diagnostic test.
ACS Cent. Sci. 10.1021/acscentsci.8b00879 (2019).
Article from Science in its entirety. 2019-04-12 page 143.
[*] Sebaceous gland on Wikipedia.
The news might be easier to take if it came from a dog.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by sensei_moreh on Sunday April 21 2019, @01:12PM
Seems to me, if the diagnostic volatiles can be recognized by a trained dog, we could gather our prospective patients, and have the dog sniff them one-by-one. No need to wait for development and approval of a chemical test for this first level of screening.
Geology - It's not rocket science; it's rock science