{"id":861631,"date":"2026-09-26T18:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-26T18:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/861631\/"},"modified":"2026-09-26T18:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-26T18:40:08","slug":"the-way-your-belly-button-smells-could-be-an-early-warning-sign-of-parkinsons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/861631\/","title":{"rendered":"The way your belly button smells could be an early warning sign of Parkinson’s"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your funky belly button could hold vital clues about your health \u2014 including signs of Parkinson\u2019s, which is notoriously hard to diagnose.<\/p>\n

No single lab or test<\/a> can confirm a Parkinson\u2019s 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<\/a> to get answers.<\/p>\n

In fact, people send their T-shirts<\/a> to a woman in Scotland named Joy Milne, who claims she can sniff out the condition long before symptoms appear.<\/p>\n

Parkinson\u2019s is notoriously hard to diagnose, but scent might hold a clue for easier identification. Krakenimages.com \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n

She smelled it first on her husband about a decade before he was diagnosed with Parkinson\u2019s. Milne was even put to the test at The University of Edinburgh<\/a> \u2014 and nosed out who had the disease with \u201cincredible\u201d accuracy.<\/p>\n

New research is uncovering how Parkinson\u2019s may leave a detectable chemical signature in body odor, and opening the door to earlier and more accessible diagnoses \u2014 without shipping to Scotland.<\/p>\n

What the research showed<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So even with exceptional cleaning, smells usually accumulate in these areas. They are \u201cless exposed to perfume, soap, and other factors,\u201d they explain, which makes them \u201can easily accessible source of human body odor volatilome,\u201d aka bodily smells.<\/p>\n

Belly buttons are one place in the body where skin, oil, and sweat naturally accumulate. mikhail_b_azarov \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n

Researchers in Germany<\/a> looked at volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, chemicals that evaporate into the air at room temperature. Many have strong smells \u2014 like perfumes, fresh paint and some glues \u2014 but others can\u2019t be detected by smell.<\/p>\n

They swabbed 24 participants \u2014 six with Parkinson\u2019s, six with mild cognitive impairment, six with COVID-19 and six healthy control participants.<\/p>\n

Researchers blasted the swabs with highly purified air, making the VOCs come out to be analyzed by lasers. They were able to get a kind of fingerprint of the mix of VOCs in each swab, and compare swabs to each other to see if there were any in common.<\/p>\n

Parkinson\u2019s affects more than 1.1 million people in the US. Flashizzle24\/peopleimages.com \u2013 stock.adobe.com<\/p>\n

They found each group patterns across each participant\u2019s fingerprints. They even tested several more Parkinson\u2019s participants a few weeks later to see if the results would be consistent, and they were.<\/p>\n

Why it matters<\/p>\n

This was a very small study with only two dozen participants, so we can\u2019t say yet that this will be the new way to diagnose Parkinson\u2019s \u2014 or COVID-19, or cognitive impairment.<\/p>\n

However, it did its job as a proof of concept: showing that non-invasive sampling combined with laser spectroscopy might form the basis of a screening tool in the future.<\/p>\n

Scientists say future research will need to test larger populations, especially to determine whether the patterns seen here were a result of Parkinson\u2019s, aging, or a combination of both. That means comparing people of similar ages with and without Parkinson\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Further research also will need \u201creal world\u201d testing that deals with the reality of variable soap, perfumes, hygiene, and other contaminants that might affect this kind of test.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your funky belly button could hold vital clues about your health \u2014 including signs of Parkinson\u2019s, which is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":861632,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[2594,6883,97,766,3284],"class_list":["post-861631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-aging","tag-coronavirus","tag-health","tag-parkinsons-disease","tag-study-says"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=861631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861631\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/861632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}