71–77 of 77 posts
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"with larger more complex molecules." What are "larger, more complex, molecules"? Without trolling, I think scent cuts off at a MW 330 or something.
But it's not as good with distinguishing complex organic molecules one from another, no? I.e. between various proteins of a similar size.
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.
Are you a bad person then? I looks like this woman was able to put her ability into noble use. Why couldn't you?
Jesus, laugh a little.
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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 existin…
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.
They also found the molecule she was smelling which was expressed with sebum. This isn't entirely unfounded as they already knew about dogs smelling cancers and other various diseases.
According this 2022 piece from the University of Manchester, it seems there have been some notable updates on the research. By using mass spectrometry, a technique that measures the weight of molecules, they have found that there are distinctive Parkinson’s markers in sebum – an oily substance secreted from the skin. This breakthrough has led them to develop a non-invasive swab test that can, in conjunction with the…
I was reading along and thinking to myself "why aren't we taking these tee-shirts to a mass spectrometer?!" I figured maybe mass spectroscopy wasn't quite the end all be all tool I was imagining.
Since she could also smell TB, Alzheimer's, cancer, and diabetes it seems like those should be (especially cancer since dogs can smell some of that too) the next high value targets to determine the relevant smells.
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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…
The science direct link isn't working for me. But here's the problem as I see it. Parkinsons has an occurrence rate in the population of 0.1%. If there are conditions which cause the same smells as Parkinsons and they are more common in the population (1%, 5%, 10%) then this test all the sudden becomes very not useful because even at 1% occurrence rate in the population it's already 10x more likely that you have that…
Absolutely, it may not be useful as a screening test on the general population, but it may be useful as a piece of evidence for diagnosis alongside other pieces of evidence. Even for a test with a lot of false positives, the P(Parkinson's|positive) > P(Parkinson's|negative).
I generally agree that a lot of media doesn't accurately portray uncertainty in medical advancements, buts it's not as simple as having a sample size threshold. It really depends on the significance and the strength of the effect. Also, I want to hear about the exciting preliminary stuff, provided that it's properly caveated. There's just a lot of incentives to sensationalise.
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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.
Ketones are the "metallic" smell. I wouldn't describe it as sweet.
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Are you a bad person then? I looks like this woman was able to put her ability into noble use. Why couldn't you?
Yes, I am a terrible person because people can't seem to understand what might be construed as a "vague attempt at humor" as such. Jesus, laugh a little.
I did, but then I got worried about humanity.