Shared from parkinsonsnewstoday.com.
Two trained dogs detected Parkinson’s disease with high accuracy by smelling skin swabs of patients who had not yet received treatment, adding to growing evidence that scent carries a chemical signature that could help enable early, noninvasive diagnosis.
Bumper, a golden retriever, and Peanut, a black Labrador, were trained for several weeks by Medical Detection Dogs, a U.K. charity, to distinguish between the oily skin secretions — known as sebum — of people with Parkinson’s and those without the disease.
While researchers do not see dogs as diagnostic tools, the study, done in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the University of Manchester, suggests that their “incredible sense of smell” could help with more rapid screening, potentially leading to earlier Parkinson’s treatment, the researchers said.