Parkinson's Disease Has a Smell That Some Dogs Can Detect
In a double blind trial, a Golden Retriever and a Labrador were able to sniff out which skin swabs came from people with Parkinson's.
The smell of the oily secretions seemed to hold secret clues.
"The dogs in this study achieved high sensitivity and specificity and showed there is an olfactory signature distinct to patients with the disease," says animal behavioral scientist Nicola Rooney from the University of Bristol.
"Sensitivity levels of 70 percent and 80 percent are well above chance, and I believe that dogs could help us to develop a quick, non-invasive, and cost-effective method to identify patients with Parkinson's disease."
Related:
Today, there is no definitive early test for Parkinson's, which is why scientists are so interested in finding potential biomarkers of the disease on our skin.
The knowledge that Parkinson's distinctly changes a person's body odor first came to light roughly a decade ago – all because of one woman.
Twelve years before her husband's diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, Joy Milne could sense something was off – specifically, she could smell it.
Milne, a Scottish nurse, is known as a 'super-smeller', and in 2016, she became famous among neuroscientists for her extraordinary abilities.
In a small pilot study, Milne correctly identified each patient with Parkinson's disease based solely on the scent of their shirts. Her one misidentification turned out to be correct nearly a year later.
The news raised an important question: If someone like Milne could smell Parkinson's years before it was diagnosed, could a dog do the same?
Dogs are known to have incredible senses of smell, far more powerful than our own. Previous studies have found our pets can smell our stress, our coronavirus infections, and even our cancers – so if a distinct odor for Parkinson's does exist, then maybe a dog can sniff it out, too.
In the past decade, a few preliminary trials have provided evidence for that hypothesis. But some only gave limited information on how the dogs were trained and tested.
The recent trial from the UK is a collaboration between a program called Medical Detection Dogs and neuroscientists at the University of Manchester.
One goal of the research is to figure out what the dogs are actually smelling, and why.
In 2019, for instance, researchers at Manchester helped identify which odor compounds set the distinctive smell of Parkinson's apart. Their results were later confirmed by Milne, the serendipitous "super-smeller".
A few years on, the odor compounds were used to create a diagnostic 'swab test' for Parkinson's, currently in testing.
Perhaps, further down the road, trained dogs could help neuroscientists identify more unique biomarkers of the disease.
The trouble is, though, not all canines are up to snuff. In the current trial, only 2 out of 10 dogs made it through training, and neither performed perfectly.
One dog, for instance, falsely flagged a tenth of the odor swabs from healthy people as having Parkinson's. The other gave false alarms less than 2 percent of the time.
Overall, however, the dogs could smell which person had Parkinson's at a rate well above chance, providing proof of principle.
"We are extremely proud to say that once again, dogs can very accurately detect disease," says Claire Guest, the CEO of Medical Detection Dogs.
"There is currently no early test for Parkinson's disease and symptoms may start up to 20 years before they become visible and persistent leading to a confirmed diagnosis.
"Timely diagnosis is key… "
The study was published in the Journal of Parkinson's Disease.
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CNN
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Eating minimally processed meals doubles weight loss even when ultraprocessed foods are healthy, study finds
Food & health UKFacebookTweetLink Follow People in the United Kingdom lost twice as much weight eating meals typically made at home than they did when eating store-bought ultraprocessed food considered healthy, the latest research has found. 'This new study shows that even when an ultraprocessed diet meets nutritional guidelines, people will still lose more weight eating a minimally processed diet,' said coauthor Dr. Kevin Hall, a former senior investigator at the US National Institutes of Health who has conducted some of the world's only controlled clinical trials on ultraprocessed foods. 'This (study) is the largest and longest randomized controlled clinical trial of ultraprocessed foods to date,' Hall added. Hall's past research sequestered healthy volunteers from the world for a month at a time, measuring the impact of ultraprocessed food on their weight, body fat and various biomarkers of health. In a 2019 study, he found people in the United States ate about 500 calories more each day and gained weight when on an ultraprocessed diet than when eating a minimally processed diet matched by calories and nutrients. The weight loss from minimally processed food in the new study was modest — only 2% of the person's baseline weight, said study first author Samuel Dicken, a research fellow at the department of behavioral science and health and the Centre for Obesity Research at University College London. 'Though a 2% reduction may not seem very big, that is only over eight weeks and without people trying to actively reduce their (food) intake,' Dicken said in a statement. 'If we scaled these results up over the course of a year, we'd expect to see a 13% weight reduction in men and a 9% reduction in women.' Men typically have more lean muscle mass than women, which along with testosterone often gives them a quicker boost over women when it comes to weight loss, experts say. The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, provided free ultraprocessed or minimally processed meals and snacks to 55 overweight people in the UK for a total of eight weeks. After a short break, the groups switched to the opposite diet for another eight weeks. Study participants were told to eat as much or as little of the 4,000 daily calories as they liked and record their consumption in a diary. By the end of the study, 50 people had spent eight weeks on both diets. While the number of participants may seem small at first glance, providing 16 weeks of food and implementing randomized controlled clinical trials can be costly. For the first eight weeks, 28 people received daily deliveries of minimally processed meals and snacks, such as overnight oats and homemade spaghetti Bolognese. 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Researchers in this study, however, did something unusual, said Christopher Gardner, Rehnborg Farquhar Professor of Medicine at Stanford University in California who directs the Stanford Prevention Research Center's Nutrition Studies Research Group. 'They tried to make a healthy ultraprocessed diet by picking ultraprocessed foods with the recommended number of fruits, veggies and fiber and lower levels of salt, sugar and saturated fats,' said Gardner, who was not involved in the study. Both the ultraprocessed and the minimally processed meals had to meet the nutritional requirements of the Eatwell Guide, the UK's official government guidance on how to eat a healthy, balanced diet. The United States has similar dietary guidelines, which are used to set federal nutritional standards. 'This is a very solid study, matching dietary interventions for nutrients and food group distribution, while varying only the contribution of ultra-processed foods,' said Dr. David Katz, a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine, in an email. Katz, who was not involved in the study, is the founder of the nonprofit True Health Initiative, a global coalition of experts dedicated to evidence-based lifestyle medicine. The study's goal was weight loss, which often comes with improved cardiovascular readings, such as lower blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels. That happened, but in rather odd and surprising ways, said Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, who was asked to write an editorial to be published with the study. Instead of gaining weight, people on the ultraprocessed diet chose to eat 120 fewer calories a day, thus losing a small amount of weight. 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'This might imply that processing is not as important for heart health if the foods already meet the standard UK healthy eating guidance,' Koutoukidis said in a statement. 'Further research is needed to better understand this.' According to Hall, the results fit quite nicely with preliminary results from his current study that is still underway. In that research, Hall and his team measured the impact of four configurations of ultraprocessed foods on the health of 36 volunteers. Each lived for a month in the Metabolic Clinical Research Unit of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. 'When you modify an ultraprocessed diet to have lower energy (calorie) density and fewer highly palatable foods, you can offset some of the effects of ultraprocessed foods in causing excess calorie intake and weight gain,' Hall said. In other words, choose healthier foods regardless of the levels of processing. 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Yahoo
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Euronews Culture's Film of the Week: 'Jurassic World Rebirth' – A dino-mite return to form?
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Yahoo
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‘Cult' of tourniquets causing thousands of unnecessary amputations and deaths in Ukraine, say surgeons
The tourniquet has saved many thousands of lives and limbs in war zones around the world, but misuse of the device is causing huge numbers of excess amputations and deaths in Ukraine, say top military surgeons. Captain Rom A Stevens, a retired senior US medical navy officer who has served in Iraq, Afghanistan, and East Africa, estimates that of the roughly 100,000 amputations performed on Ukrainian soldiers since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, as many as 75,000 were caused by improper use of tourniquets. 'I've seen tourniquets that have been left on for days, often for injuries that could have been stopped by other methods. Then [the patient] has to have their limb amputated because the tissue has died,' Captain Stevens told The Telegraph. Tourniquets are strong bands used to stop catastrophic bleeding by cutting off blood flow, and are standard issue for most modern armies. But if left on over two hours, they can cause tissue death, meaning the arm or leg which has the tourniquet on is no longer viable and requires amputation. The device became standard-issue in the 2000s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where rapid air evacuation to military surgical teams was possible in under 60 minutes. If the tourniquet was unnecessary it was removed, and no harm was done. But in Ukraine, where the skies are infested with drones, injured soldiers are evacuated by land, often far exceeding the safe time window for tourniquet use. This critical delay has caused tens of thousands of amputations, say experts, many of which were unnecessary because the injuries didn't require a tourniquet in the first place. It has also led to a sharp rise in young Ukrainians needing dialysis, said Captain Stevens who has served as a medical volunteer in hospitals in Zaporizhzhiya, Dnipro, and L'viv since the invasion in 2022. This is because when a tourniquet is removed after being kept on too long, toxins from dead tissue flood the bloodstream, overwhelming the kidneys. Captain Stevens helped draft the US military guidelines for tourniquet use and now wishes greater emphasis had been placed on assessing when they were needed to stop bleeding. He fears that their successful use in wars where rapid evacuation was possible has led to a 'cult-like' dependence on a tool that should be used much more sparingly. In Ukraine, it has left 'a generation of men traumatised by unnecessary amputations,' he said. The US Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) handbook was created for trained military medics operating in war zones in the 1990s and heavily promotes the use of tourniquets in war, describing their use as 'the best method to control life-threatening bleeding'. Widely adopted by NATO and Western armed forces in the early 2000s, the TCCC standards were quickly integrated into Ukrainian military and civilian medical training following the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. Captain Stevens – though an author of the TCCC – says this was a error. 'If you have a perfect battlefield, then tourniquets work. But if you don't – if you have a situation like Ukraine today – you can end up with a tragedy. And that's what the Ukrainians have,' he said. 'There's now hundreds of thousands of tourniquets that have been distributed to military forces, civilians, fire departments, and police in Ukraine. It's become a cult, and because it saved lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, people think it's a good idea,' he added. While most Western militaries embed specialist medics in every unit, Ukraine's armed forces – made up largely of conscripts and civilian volunteers – often rely on medics with only a few weeks or even days of training who are often unable to distinguish between injuries that do and don't require tourniquets. 'The Ukrainian infantry and artillery battalions are undermanned. They can't replace their medics when they get injured or killed,' Captain Stevens said. A 2022 study by a Ukrainian military vascular surgeon, Dr Vladyslav Yatsun, found that only 24.6 per cent of war wounded patients arriving at hospital with tourniquets had injuries that justified their use to stop bleeding. 'In all other cases, the use of pressure bandages was more appropriate,' the study said. They are also often being applied too high on damaged limbs, said Captain Stevens. 'They are often taught to place on the tourniquets well above the wounds, and the result is a very high amputation, making it difficult to later fit a prosthesis,' he said. An updated version of the Ukrainian TCCC disseminated to the armed forces in January 2024 specifically reads: 'Place the tourniquet 'high and tight' on the wounded extremity.' NATO has also raised concerns about tourniquets in Ukraine. Last year, the agency dispatched a team of medical and military experts to investigate what it described as 'an unacceptable high complication rate from the use of tourniquets [...] resulting in amputations, renal failure and even death.' The organisation added: 'The current situation with prolonged evacuation times requires a shift in attitude towards tourniquets,' although it has yet to formally publish its recommendations. Experts stress that tourniquets continue to save many lives and should not be abandoned. Instead, they say that in places like Ukraine where rapid evacuation is difficult they should only be used in the three circumstances in which they are absolutely necessary. The first is when a limb has been completely severed. 'In that situation, you need a tourniquet, but you need to put it as low down as possible to try and save as much of the limb as you can,' said Captain Stevens. The second is when the limb is so damaged that it cannot be saved – a decision that requires judgement and medical third is when a person has uncontrolled arterial bleeding that cannot be stopped with direct pressure or any other method. Captain Stevens said tourniquets are often applied by panicked soldiers, who lack the knowledge or confidence to try other methods first. 'When a [Ukrainian] soldier is injured in the field, they're usually taken care of by other soldiers in a panic,' he said. 'They see blood. They put on tourniquets because they have tourniquets. We gave them tourniquets.' Dr Ostap Zubach, an orthopaedic surgeon who works at a major trauma hospital in L'viv, agrees that while tourniquets can be life-saving, they can also be deadly when used incorrectly. 'As a doctor, I believe that in the right hands, tourniquets are a brilliant thing. But in the wrong hands, they can be very dangerous,' he said. A particular problem was that many soldiers did not know how to temporarily loosen a tourniquet periodically to extend the time of safe use. 'The strategy of tourniquets [in Ukraine] is just not working, especially when [the soldiers] don't know how to convert them,' said Dr Zubach. 'Many of our soldiers have no experience in the military or medicine.' Major General Anatoliy Petrovych Kazmirchuk, Commander of the Medical Forces of the Ukrainian Army, introduced tourniquet 'conversion' into the basic military training programme last year following reports of excessive amputations and limb loss at the front. But both Captain Stevens and Dr Zubach are sceptical on what impact the new training is having. 'The problem is that under fire, people are afraid to take the tourniquets down. They're in a rush to get that patient to a hospital surgeon and don't stop to convert them,' said Captain Stevens. A growing group of medics both in and outside of Ukraine are now putting pressure on the ministry of defence to move away from the TCCC handbook and develop their own set of medical guidelines for use in the Ukrainian context, factoring in long evacuation times. 'Guidelines are only guidelines. They require common sense to apply, they require professional judgement. In Ukraine, they don't have a system for developing guidelines. Often they just take Western, US, British, NATO guidelines, and translate them, word for word into Ukrainian,' said Captain Stevens. 'But there's a lot of resistance to changing it. The Ukrainians are taking their cue from the Americans, but our protocols were not designed for this situation,' he added. 'If you go back to World War Two and you read what the American theatre surgeons had to say about tourniquets, they said they were dangerous because they were often placed on wounds that did not require them, and then not taken off before it was too late,' he said. 'You didn't have a rapid evacuation there either. You're evacuating by land, over bumpy roads, in the middle of the night under fire, just like what the Ukrainians are doing now.' Both Dr Zubach and Captain Stevens say more emphasis needs to be put on basic casualty care, like cutting off clothes to examine the wound to see the source of bleeding, use of pressure bandages, and alginates – jelly-like dressings that can absorb heavy bleeding and pack into wounds without the long-term risks associated with a tourniquet. Both agree that tourniquets should be used only as a last resort, when all else has failed. 'Soldiers and medics need to understand that when a tourniquet is placed on the Ukrainian battlefield, it usually means an amputated limb,' says Stevens. Protect yourself and your family by learning more about Global Health Security
