TWO dogs have been trained to detect Parkinson’s disease years before symptoms appear with a 98 per cent accuracy, sniffing out early disease markers detected from skin swabs.
The two dogs in the study were a Golden Retriever and a black Labrador.
This new research is in collaboration with Medical Detection Dogs and the University of Bristol and Manchester and was published on July 15, 2025 in The Journal of Parkinson’s Disease.
The dogs were trained by Medical Detection Dogs to distinguish between sebum swabs from people with and without Parkinson’s disease.
They were trained over a few weeks on over 200 odour samples from people who had tested positive for the disease and on control people who did not have the disease.
In a double blinded trial, only a computer knew which were the correct samples until the trial was completed.
The dogs, surprisingly, detected the scent in samples from patients who also had other health conditions.
Samples of skin sebum were presented to the dogs on a frame-stand system and the dogs were rewarded for correctly indicating a positive sample (by either sitting or freezing) or by ignoring a negative sample.
Because symptoms of the disease may gradually start 20 years before they become noticeable, it is important to diagnose early.
So far there has been no definitive diagnostic test.
Identification of biomarkers could greatly help with early intervention and possibly slow down the progression of the disease and reduce the intensity of symptoms.
The dogs used in this study achieved high sensitivity and specificity which are well above ‘chance’.
Dogs can help us develop a quick non-invasive, cost-effective method for identifying people with Parkinsons Disease.
Many various dogs can be trained like this, what makes the Labrador and retriever suitable, apart from being scent specific breeds is their ‘eager to work’ attitude, friendly but focused temperament.
Since this experiment, scientists have found the protein Alpha-synuclein, a protein of the brain and nervous system which plays a role in neural communication.
In Parkinson’s it aggregates, clumps and can be found in skin and cerebral spinal fluid.
These invasive tests are now available, but not in Australia, yet.
