A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
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Re: A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
#2This discovery (if true) is as improbable and wonderful as luis pasteur and bacteria or fleming and penicilin
Re: A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
#3Re: A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
#4This discovery (if true) is as improbable and wonderful as luis pasteur and bacteria or fleming and penicilin
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Re: A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
#5I 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.
Re: A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
#6> 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.
Re: A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
#7> 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…
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.
Re: A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
#8They 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.
Re: A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
#92020 Also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
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)
Re: A woman who can smell Parkinson's is inspiring research into diagnosis (2020)
#10They 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.
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.