Smell test may predict Alzheimer’s disease

[astro]

Quite fascinating!

Smell test may predict Alzheimer’s disease

For the study Devanand and colleagues studied 150 patients with minimal to mild cognitive impairment. They compared them to 63 healthy elderly people and ran tests on them every 6 months.

The inability to identify 10 specific odors clearly predicted who would go on to develop Alzheimer’s, they told a meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

These smells included strawberry, smoke, soap, menthol, clove, pineapple, natural gas, lilac, lemon and leather.

“Narrowing the list of odors can potentially expedite screening and help with early diagnosis,” Devanand said in a statement.

This makes sense, he added, because examination of the brains of Alzheimer’s patients shows that the nerve pathways involved in smell are affected at a very early stage

[Tiggrkitty]

Interesting.

My father has Alzheimer’s, and he is 86 years old. Thanks for sharing Astro.

[lavenderviolet]

Glad you posted about this. It would be great if this could be used in diagnosis. Early diagnosis can help with slowing the progression of the disease.

[rjk]

I guess I’m OK so far.

That test might have something to do with the subject of this thread.

Thanks, astro.

[irishgirl]

Interesting, but I doubt it will actually help that much, unless you have every elderly person given the test at every doctors visit. Dementia tends to be fairly slow and insidious onset, by the time most people realise that there is a problem, it’s usually quite significant.

It’s a very small study, since 5% of the over 60s and 20% of the over 80s have some form of Dementia, they’d need to repeat it on a much larger basis. Also, they’d have to see if it was specific to Alzheimers, or was present in normal age related memory loss or the other forms of dementia.