Key takeaways:

The dogs showed high sensitivity and specificity between samples of patients with Parkinson’s disease and control subjects.

Agreement between both dogs was higher than predicted for Parkinson’s-positive samples.

Dogs can be trained to sniff out a telltale scent related to Parkinson’s disease from skin swabs with high degrees of certainty, potentially paving the way for non-invasive, biomarker-based detection methods for the condition, data show.

“The current unmet need is to develop a test of clinical utility that can triage the diagnosis of persons with Parkinson’s disease,” Nicola Rooney, PhD, lead study author and associate professor in wildlife health and conservation at Bristol Veterinary School at the University of Bristol, told Healio about the study published

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