Over the years, I’ve talked to dozens of people with Parkinson’s disease (PD). They come from all socio-economic backgrounds. Rich and poor. Male and female. But the one thing they have in common is this: It took months or (in many cases) years to get their diagnosis.
Every moment that ticks by untreated is a moment that could have been given over to meaningful treatments, exercise, diet, and other healthy pursuits. But at present, there are no established means of diagnosing Parkinson’s — even though more than 10 million people worldwide have this progressively debilitating disease.
But researcher Honglei Chen, at the Michigan State University, hopes to change that. Last week, he published the findings of a study linking the loss of the sense of smell with Parkinson’s. He’s developed a test that could identify certain people who are at an increased risk of developing the disease up to 10 years before they are actually diagnosed. Previous research has shown an association between sense of smell and disease progression of up to four to five years.
The federally funded study, now published online in Neurology, the official publication of the American Academy of Neurology, was also one of the first to follow black people.
“One of the key differences in our study was we followed older white and black participants for an average of about 10 years, much longer than any other previous study,” Chen said. “We found that there was a strong link between smell and disease risk for up to six years. After that, the link remained, but just wasn’t as strong.”
The research included 1,510 white and 952 black participants with an average age of 75. The test asked people to smell 12 common odors including cinnamon, lemon, gasoline, soap, and onion, and then select the correct answer from four choices.
Participants were monitored for ten years and tracked to see who developed PD. They discovered that people with a poor sense of smell where nearly FIVE TIMES more likely to develop the disease! Of the 764 people with a poor sense of smell, 26 people developed the disease, compared to just seven of the 835 people whose sense of smell was good and 9 of the 863 people whose sense of smell was categorized as medium.
