Professor Matthew Cobb

There's a cultural expectation.

Yes.

And this goes back a long way.

So, I mean, in the early days of medicine or what passed for medicine, one of the ways that you'd, for example, be able to tell if somebody was diabetic was smelling and even drinking their urine because you'd find it was very sweet.

And so they've clearly got a problem metabolising sugar.

There's a great deal of interest in how odours may reflect early stages of diseases.

And this is particularly the case in Parkinson's disease.

So about 10 years ago, a woman called Joy Milne, who used to be a nurse, she was at a Parkinson's Society meeting where an expert in Parkinsonism was describing the symptoms.

And she said to him...

do people with Parkinson's smell different?

Because I noticed before my husband had any symptoms that his head started to smell different.

And this led to a great interest both in Joy, who's what's called a super smeller, she's got an extremely sensitive nose, she can detect lots of different odours, and trying to identify the causes of this and are there links between this apparent ability to

to detect earlier stages of Parkinson's, before there are any symptoms, by particular smells.

And it has been very, very hard.

Huge interest around the world in this.

They have come up with a number of potential odours that may be biomarkers of the earlier stages of Parkinson's, but there still is no test.

She is extraordinary.

There are other people like that, you know, people who are trained as analogues to develop wine or perfume who can do this kind of thing.

But then using them as a probe to try and get to some underlying physiological disturbance is very, very hard to know exactly what's going on.

If there's a change, I mean, in any part of your body, you know, but smell is one of the most kind of subtle and perhaps significant ones, then clearly if something happens to your body that means people around you are now noticing you in a different way, then really go and see a GP.