A Scottish woman has an extremely unique skill in smelling Parkinson’s disease (Image: Parkinson’s UK/ PA)
A Scottish woman who has an extremely rare ability to smell revealed what she smelt on her husband years before his diagnosis. Medical marvel Joy Milne, from Perth, has a hyper-sensitive sense of smell that has earned her the nickname “the woman who .
Joy, a nurse, had been with her late husband, Les, since the tender age of 16 years old, meaning she had become accustomed to his smell. The pair married after college. Les went on to become a doctor, whilst Joy became a , and they had three boys. Joy knew Les more than 12 years before he was diagnosed when she identified a change in the way he smelled.
Les sadly died in 2015 at the age of 65 (Image: BBC)
“He had this musty rather unpleasant smell especially round his shoulders and the back of his neck and his skin had definitely changed,” she said.
At first Joy thought it must be something from the hospital where he worked and told him to shower, but that didn’t help, and over the weeks and months that followed the smell just seemed to grow stronger.
So Joy started nagging.
She said: “[I] kept saying to him … ‘Look, you know, you’re not washing enough.’ “
But the smell wouldn’t go away and eventually Les got frustrated at Joy as he couldn’t smell it and neither could anyone else.
At age 45 Les was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, he died in 2015 at the age of 65.
The couple went on to make the connection between Joy’s sense of smell and his diagnosis, but it wasn’t until they attended a Parkinson’s support group when she was hit with an overwhelmingly familiar smell.
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Joy has a 95% accuracy in detecting Parkinson’s disease in someone (Image: BBC)
Putting her unique skill to use Joy has gone on to do all she can to help scientists work out a way to use her sense of smell as a means of early Parkinson’s disease detection.
“Les and I should have been enjoying retirement, but Parkinson’s had stolen our lives,” said Joy.
“We became determined that others wouldn’t suffer the same way. When Les died in June 2015, he made me promise I’d carry on. I spent time in labs, smelling sufferers’ T-shirts and swabs for sebum – the skin oil we all produce, which changes with the onset of Parkinson’s.
“I could detect whether the person had the disease with 95% accuracy. I was surprised.”
Joy has spent the last couple of years in Manchester to create a new method which they say can detect the disease in just three minutes.