We all have our unique body smell. However, some things also smell similar, and your scent can reveal a lot about your health! Apparently, some diseases will create a distinct smell that shows up years before you show symptoms of the disease! Keep reading to discover more about it.
Some diseases have a certain smell
A 74-year-old nurse, Joy Milne, claimed that she could smell if people had Parkinson’s or not. She noticed that her late husband had gotten a “musky” smell years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. While at first she didn’t seem to link the new smell with anything, later, when she and her husband attended a group meeting for Parkinson’s patients, she realized that all the others had the same exact smell.
Perdita Barran didn’t believe her at first, but later decided to see if Joy was telling the truth. They had 12 t-shirts, six worn by people with parkinson’s, and six worn by healthy adults. She was able to point out all six patients immediately. However, the best part came when she pointed to an extra shirt from one of the healthy people, and this patient ended up being diagnosed with the disease less than a year later.
Scientist have since started looking for ways to detect other diseases before people have been diagnosed with them. Now, in 2025, there are active ways to see if people have certain types of cancers or other diseases just by the way they smell.
Dogs are used to detect diseases
It is general knowledge that dogs have better noses than humans. However, what some people might not realize is that their nose works 100,000 times better than humans’. In the past few years, dogs have been trained to detect the “smell” of certain diseases like Lung, breast, bladder, and even prostate cancers with a 99% accuracy, making it more effective than most tests.
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