The way your belly button smells could be an early warning sign of Parkinsons

Your funky belly button could hold vital clues about your health — including signs of Parkinson’s, which is notoriously hard to diagnose.No single lab or test can confirm a Parkinson’s diagnosis, and doctors are left to rely on symptoms, medical history, and tests like MRIs to rule out other conditions.Sometimes it can take years to get answers.In fact, people send their T-shirts to a woman in Scotland named Joy Milne, who claims she can sniff out the condition long before symptoms appear.She smelled it first on her husband about a decade before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

Milne was even put to the test at The University of Edinburgh — and nosed out who had the disease with “incredible” accuracy.New research is uncovering how Parkinson’s may leave a detectable chemical signature in body odor, and opening the door to earlier and more accessible diagnoses — without shipping to Scotland.All day, every day, your body is producing oil, sweat, and dead skin.Everything from what you eat to the medications you take are processed by the body and come out in these secretions, plus your breath, urine, and saliva.Most of this stuff gets removed by cleaning every day.

What researchers deliberately tested here were places that escape regular cleaning: the belly button, inside the nose, and bowl-shaped area outside the ear canal.So even with exceptional cleaning, smells usually accumulate in these areas.They are “less exposed to perfume, soap, and other factors,” they explain, which makes them “an easily accessible source of human body odor volatilome,” aka bodily smells.Researchers in Germany looked at volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, chemicals that evaporate into the air at room temperature.

Many have strong smells — like perfumes, fresh paint and some glues — but others can’t be detected by smell.They swabbed 24 participants — six with Parkinson’s, six with mild cognitive impairment, six with COVID-19 and six healthy control par...