Joy Mile, a 65 year-old woman from Scotland, realized over the course of years that her longtime husband's scent was different from the one she was used to, after it'd been subtly changing for a long time - as it turned out, what happened was that she's caught Parkinson's smell.
In an incredible story, Mile noticed this Parkinson's smell six years ahead of her husband's official diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, and was later put to test other people who had already been diagnosed and 11 out of 12 times, she got it right, which is raising serious doubts about how to study this degenerative condition further.
According to BBC, Joy didn't link the change of scent in her husband until she'd met other people with this condition and realized they bore the same odor, which she has now come to associate as the Parkinson's smell - and she's baffling scientists with this uncanny ability.
"His smell changed and it seemed difficult to describe," Milne told the BBC recently. "It wasn't all of a sudden. It was very subtle - a musky smell."
At some point, Mile told a few scientists about her ability to notice the Parkinson's smell, so researchers at the University of Edinburgh set out to test her - and it turned out she really could diagnose people with Parkinson's only by their smell.
Time Magazine reports that, for the Parkinson's smell study, Scottish scientists provided her with 12 t-shirts in total previously worn by others, six of whom had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease while the other half didn't have it - and Milne got 11 out of 12 right.
Milne insisted one of the men in the control group had Parkinson's, with researchers saying it wasn't the case - until they were proven wrong eight months later, when he was diagnosed with the condition.
According to USA Today, support and research Parkinson's UK is now sponsoring a new line of research based on Milne's uncanny ability, as this new discovery of Parkinson's smell could ultimately lead to earlier detection.
