[HN Gopher] A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring resea...
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A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into
diagnosis (2020)
Author : lvnfg
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-02-13 16:42 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| se4u wrote:
| This discovery (if true) is as improbable and wonderful as luis
| pasteur and bacteria or fleming and penicilin
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| 2020
|
| Also
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _A Woman Who Can Smell Parkinson 's_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21532937 - Nov 2019 (87
| comments)
|
| _A woman who can smell Parkinson 's disease_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10434974 - Oct 2015 (114
| comments)
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I would hate to have that ability.
|
| The temptation to use it as a curse would be too great.
|
| You spilled water on my shoe! _sniff_ I curse your grandfather
| with dementia!
|
| And when grandad got dementia they would think of me and hate me
| and wonder if evil magic was real.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| > But Joy's superpower is so unusual that researchers all over
| the world have started working with her and have discovered that
| she can identify several kinds of illnesses -- tuberculosis,
| Alzheimer's disease, cancer and diabetes.
|
| The story for diagnosing Parkinson's sounded plausible until this
| sentence. With Parkinson's, you could imagine that she had some
| sort of sensitivity in her smell to a certain biomarker.
|
| Now with a plethora of vastly different diseases (even cancer is
| really a myriad of diseases grouped together), the suspicion of a
| confounder goes way up.
|
| Perhaps instead of diagnosing Parkinson's, she is actually
| sensing some signal that indicates inflammation or some other
| distress signal.
|
| Or else people, prior to the manifestations of these diseases
| tend to make subtle, unconscious changes to their hygiene.
| patientzero wrote:
| If the goal is early diagnosis and the separate detections
| aren't getting confounded, why does it matter what parallel
| chain of causation leads to Parkinson in the patient and a
| correlating reading in the nose or other test?
|
| If no one in a normal state has the same mix of fear, anger and
| confusion and this leads to a microbial change around sweat
| glands, then that is a valid test of greater accuracy than many
| existing medical tests.
| cogman10 wrote:
| But what if, for example, she's just sensitive to the smell
| of fecal matter and these people tend to have loser poops?
| Now is she detecting parkinson or is she detecting IBS or
| someone that ate something spicy or drank milk while being
| lactose intolerant.
|
| The issue is the one of the false positive and bayesian
| statistics. If she's detecting something that has a bunch of
| common causes then it's not really helpful to run a suite of
| tests to find an underlying problem on everyone that smells
| the same.
|
| A fever can be a sign of cancer, but it's also a sign of the
| flu. Should we check everyone with a fever for cancer?
| jondea wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but a very quick search showed a meta
| analysis[1] which considers the false positives of using
| volatile biomarkers as a diagnosis. The original paper[2],
| of which Joy is co-author has a much smaller sample size,
| but also has a control group to measure false positives.
|
| Again, I'm not an expert, but from personal experience I
| know that Parkinson's can be hard to diagnose definitively
| until there are serious symptoms. This tests may still be
| relatively poor but still be useful as a piece of evidence.
|
| [1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/
| S03038...
|
| [2]:
| https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acscentsci.8b00879
| inglor_cz wrote:
| That might be just an imprecise formulation by the journalist.
|
| Smelling tuberculosis seems plausible to me, it is a disease of
| the lungs.
|
| General cancer probably no, but I have repeatedly read comments
| by oncologists that sarcoma, specifically, has a distinct
| smell.
| zeristor wrote:
| Makes me realise there is no real way to notate a smell.
|
| How do people even get a handle on what a smell is, and how
| personal an experience is it.
| kseifried wrote:
| Aroma and smell training kits exist for people into wine,
| beer and so on: https://aromaster.com/
| rpgwaiter wrote:
| I bet most (type 1) diabetics could smell other diabetics if
| they were trying. High blood sugar especially changes your body
| odor a ton. You sweat a lot more sugar for your skin bacteria
| to digest.
|
| Not to discount the woman or the article, we should totally be
| researching this stuff
| Beijinger wrote:
| Why should she not be able to detect some kinds of cancers?
| Some dogs can.
|
| In the end, all this should not be so difficult. Take the head
| space, then do MS of a bunch of people with these diseases and
| the head space and MS of healthy people as a comparison. The
| delta gives the disease.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| They didn't mention looking for other people with the same
| ability. Maybe other or many or most people can do it, if they
| know what to look for. If I smell something bad, I never consider
| that it might be a disease.
| randcraw wrote:
| If a human can do it, a dog can too, since their noses are so
| much more sensitive than any human's. I can imagine dogs
| reliably sniffing out many diseases, then this becoming a
| standard lab assay, or at least a component thereof.
| strangattractor wrote:
| They appear to be training dogs to detect PD.
|
| https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.01.23296924v....
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