Scientists discover the chemicals behind the unique Parkinson’s smell

For a subset of the patient samples, Mrs Milne smelled the compounds before they entered the mass spectrometer and pressed a button when the distinctive odour was present. As Dr Barran reports in Central Science, the mass spectrometer identified four compounds, perillic aldehyde, hippuric acid, eicosane and octadecanal, in the vaporised sebum of the Parkinson’s disease patients that were at entirely different levels to those in the healthy group. To test whether these different levels of compounds were generating the smell that Mrs Milne was detecting, Dr Barran presented them to her and confirmed that they were, indeed, responsible for the musky odour.

Source: www.economist.com