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posted by martyb on Sunday April 21 2019, @05:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the From-the-Land-Down-Under... dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 21 2019, @12:14PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 21 2019, @12:14PM (#832915)

    This looks like the full paper?
        https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.8b00879 [acs.org]

    A close relative was mis-diagnosed by her GP with "age related tremor" when in her mid-80s. Basically, this doc blew her off, saying, "You are old, things go wrong". She still felt that something was wrong with her. Changed docs and ~5 months later he suggested a slow taper-up of Levidopa-Carbidopa (Parkinson's meds) to see if they had any effect. Made a huge difference, she got her life back--could continue living independently. Trying the meds is (from what I've been told) about the only current "test" for Parkinson's.

    If this "smell" experiment can be turned into a reasonably reliable test for Parkinson's it will be a major step forward for patients. While I don't have anything but anecdotal data, an early diagnosis would have saved my relative six months of suffering.

    A future step, which seems likely, is to see if the test can be used to distinguish different forms of Parkinson's--neurologists have mentioned that there are a dozen or more variants of the disease.

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 21 2019, @01:18PM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 21 2019, @01:18PM (#832932) Homepage Journal

      An early diagnosis would have been *before* symptoms start.
      A referral to a neurologist should have been sufficient to get an on-time diagnosis.
      Many physicians are unaware of the wide variety of symptoms Parkinson's can exhibit.
      The saying is, "If you'e seen one Parkinson's patient, then you've seen just one Parkinsons's patient."
      The disease causes progressive brain damage. The initial symptoms depend mostly on what part of the brain it happens to damage first.
      Apparently only about a third of Parkinsons's patients exhibit the tremor, by the way.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by sensei_moreh on Sunday April 21 2019, @01:12PM

    by sensei_moreh (4698) on Sunday April 21 2019, @01:12PM (#832930)

    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
  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @01:16AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @01:16AM (#833214)

    This "smell test" reminds me of a close friend from high school. He would approve a variety of things with the phrase, "It smells good" -- this for things that didn't smell (or couldn't smell, like a good idea). We're still in touch and use that phrase from time to time, along with a grin.

    • (Score: 2) by martyb on Monday April 22 2019, @06:53AM

      by martyb (76) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 22 2019, @06:53AM (#833277) Journal
      I realize you were joking, but in software development there is such a concept as a sniff test or "code smell". Code that has been planned, designed, and thoughtfully crafted has a decidedly different structure and appearance from code created by a "cowboy coder" where things are just slapped together and hacked at until the code [seems to] work.
      --
      Wit is intellect, dancing.
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