Dogs arenot onlymans best friends anymore, they arehumanity’s great lab partners too. Next week, two Labradors and a Cocker Spaniel will begin sniffing the smell of700 people to hone in on the molecules people release before developing Parkinsons disease.
The canine-human team is a partnership between Manchester University and the research charity Medical Detection Dogs. The three pooches will sniff odorsamples andthe researchers will use a mass spectrometer to identify the molecules that determinethe smell of Parkinsons. Each molecule will also be given to the dogs to smelluntil the team can find the culprits.
A connection between a particular odor and the neurodegenerative disease was established a few years ago thanks to Joy Milne, a Scottish woman that possess an incredibly keen sense of smell. She noticed a change in her late husband’sscent six years before he developed any symptom of the disease.
Her skills were tested in the lab, where she was given used shirts from six people with the disease and six people in the control group. She stated that seven of those 12 individualshad the specific musky smell and she was spot on, as a member of the control group was eight months later diagnosed with Parkinsons.
Currently, researchers dont know what odor moleculesare responsible for the particular smell Milne is able to detect. Skin secretions are made of over 9,000 different molecules, so its difficult to pinpoint the specific one. That is where the dogs come in.
Medical Detection Dogs have been used in cancer studies for over a decade and theres mounting literature supporting the ability of canines to diagnosesome diseases. Around 30 percent of a dogs brain isdedicated to analyzing smells, which makes it 40 times larger than the same area in humans.
Dogs have 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to the mere 5million we humans have. They are incredible sniffers, detecting some odors that arejust 1-2 parts per trillion.
Finding an easy-to-detect method for spotting Parkinsons will hopefully helpmake diagnoses faster and more accurate. There is still no cure for Parkinsons, but beginning treatment as soon as possible can helpalleviate symptoms.
[H/T: The Times]
Read more: http://www.iflscience.com
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