Some of my patients have reported improved sense of smell after decades of hyposmia - including detecting novel scents, identifying them, and increasing the distance at which they detect them in their environments. I am doing research in mind-body and body-based interventions for Parkinson's, and can find no reports of this in the literature.
It is really an interesting observation. Unfortunately I don't know how to link the two topics but I know that patients with Nav1.7 loss of function can also suffer from anosmia. so may be the opposite is happening here, may be those people having an increase in the activity of voltage_gated sodium channel, and may be this increased in activity is linked somehow to Parkinson's !!
You could look a the thread started by Rosi Goldsmith with a question
"Is anyone aware of research on meditation and Parkinson's?"
Already heard several stories about it.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/714329_1
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24322062
Again an interesting tool to diagnose PD, but I am not sure that the concept is reliable enough to base diagnosis/disease progression only on this hypothesis.
You could have a look at another thread in Q and A, "Is there any conclusive evidence that the death of dopaminergic neurons is the cause of Parkinson's Disease?", on the causes of PD. We are accustomed to think of PD, as we used to think of cancer, as one disease with many manifestations and perhaps many causes. If the symptoms of PD were always more or less the same we could try and account for how different causes could produce them but the range of symptoms associated with PD is enormous and no two patients are the same. We ought to get used to the possibility that it may be more than one disease whose symptoms overlap and sometimes converge.
Most of us with PD are used to variations in our symptoms at daily, weekly and even longer intervals.
Examples of changes in symptoms are therefore not uncommon. I am not disparaging or discounting your observations but you may find difficulty in attracting the interest or attention of clinicians or researchers. You really need to carry out a detailed physical examination (scans etc.), and objective assessments of olfaction and other symptoms, for comparison, before and after. If I told my neurologist that a symptom had disappeared I doubt if he’d even look up.
Some publications give the impression that PD always starts with loss of the sense of smell and it very often does but not always. In fact I cannot think of any symptom that is universally present in PD patients although I admit I haven’t tried very hard to find one.
Thank you, Stephen and Nicholas for your contributions. On reconsideration, you are right that this symptom is both not reliable enough or consistent enough for an indicator of disease progression or symptom improvement. I think a distinction could be made between the function of the olfactory bulb at detecting a smell and the cortical sensory association area that identifies it.
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