31–40 of 77 posts
The Alabama paper is open access and well worth reading if you’re interested in Parkinson’s
https://www.uab.edu/news/research/item/13280-new-study-puts-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Anybody can learn pretty quick to smell diabetics. Low blood sugar leaves one's breath bitter and metallic, high blood sugar causes fruity, sweet breath. It's extremely obvious if you're at all close to them.
[0] https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/acetone-breath-diabetes
So low blood sugar causes sweet breath.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Aroma and smell training kits exist for people into wine, beer and so on: https://aromaster.com/
There's a whole pyramid scheme for perfumery, of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure any of today's mass spectrometers yet can match human smell in sensitivity, at least to some scents with larger more complex molecules.
What are "larger, more complex, molecules"? Without trolling, I think scent cuts off at a MW 330 or something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody can learn pretty quick to smell diabetics. Low blood sugar leaves one's breath bitter and metallic, high blood sugar causes fruity, sweet breath. It's extremely obvious if you're at all close to them.
On a ketogenic[diet] ... your body uses fat instead of carbohydrates for energy. This shift causes a major spike in ketones, the source of acetone breath. ... Sweet-smelling breath may be a short-term side effect of this type of diet.[0] [0] https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/acetone-breath-diabetes So low blood sugar causes sweet breath.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the tests, she's presumably smelling people known to have the disease or not, and maybe she can pick up on that knowledge through subtle social cues. Impressive in itself, but that's useless for diagnosing people who don't know they have a disease, which would be the medical breakthrough.
No presuming necessary. In the article, it describes a test involving smelling t-shirts in boxes.
> 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…
It sounds like you are assuming that every one of those illneses smell the same to her. That is that she can tell that someone has Parkinson’s or tuberculosis, or Alzheimer's, or cancer or diabetes, but she can’t tell which one they have.
The way i read it is that she can identify which one people have based on how they smell. Totaly made up example: tuberculosis smells peppery, while Alzheimer minty, and so on and so on. (Admittedly this also assumes that the journalist was sloppy about cancer. Probably she was only tested on specific types of cancers. It is very unlikely that all cancers would smell the same. But this is something which is very easy to get jumbled up by the journalist.)
Ultimately it doesn’t matter. If it verifies through a properly designed test protocol they will publish a paper about it. If not, they won’t. So if it matters we will hear about it.
I love this story. But every time I read it I wonder why we don't have electronic noses. Obviously dogs learn a lot by smelling. Why can't scientists have some. Am I too naive?