Disease Scent Signatures Disclose What the Nose Knows

Recommendable!

I would also argue that the sense of smell has been underutilized in medical diagnosis for the past 130 years or so (e.g. 1895 discover of X rays). Other diagnostic techniques took over.

Despite the fact we have had very powerful chemical analysis techniques at our disposal to analyze air and so on for many decades, but they were not really applied to smell coming from breath or body odor etc.

I bet machine learning & AI will make a huge difference in the near future!

"... Scent is a powerful time portal, reviving long-forgotten memories in stark detail. The human brain begins to build a library of smells in infancy, which grows into adulthood. For people with hereditary hyperosmia—a rare, heightened ability to detect and discern scents—this smell repository can be vast and remarkably fine-tuned. Joy Milne, a retired nurse, patient advocate, researcher, and grandmother, discovered this superpower as a child.1 Milne’s grandmother—also a super sniffer—trained her to identify scent signatures, as her own mother had taught her. As a nurse, Milne acquired an extensive clinical scent library, recognizing patterns between disease symptoms and diagnoses. After her late husband’s Parkinson’s disease (PD) diagnosis, she realized that the musky smell he wore at the nape of his neck for over a decade was an early warning sign and that she could detect it in other PD patients. "

Disease Scent Signatures Disclose What the Nose Knows | The Scientist Magazine® Researchers redefine the lost art of smelling illness using one woman’s exquisitely sensitive nose.