Something as simple as your sense of smell could soon become a key test in helping to diagnose Alzheimerโs disease early.
There has been increasing evidence that a personโs sense of smell decreases sharply in the early stages of the disease.
Now researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have created a simple โsniff testโ which appears to be efficient at diagnosing a pre-dementia condition called mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
MCI can then progress over a period of years into Alzheimerโs dementia.
David R. Roalf, PhD, an assistant professor in the department of Psychiatry at Penn said: โThereโs the exciting possibility here that a decline in the sense of smell can be used to identify people at risk years before they develop dementia,โ
Roalf and his team used an already commercially available test called the Sniffinโ Sticks Odor Identification Test.
They then asked over 700 patients to identify 16 different smells. The patients had already been grouped into three categories: โhealthy older adult,โ โmild cognitive impairment,โ or โAlzheimerโs dementia.โ
What they found was this while not wholly useful on its own, when combined with an already existing cognitive test the researchers we able to increase the accuracy of their findings from 75 per cent to 87 per cent.
โThese results suggest that a simple odour identification test can be a useful supplementary tool for clinically categorising MCI and Alzheimerโs, and even for identifying people who are at the highest risk of worsening,โ Roalf said.
โWeโre hoping to shorten the Sniffinโ Sticks test, which normally takes 5 to 8 minutes, down to 3 minutes or so, and validate that shorter testโs usefulness in diagnosing MCI and dementia โ we think that will encourage more neurology clinics to do this type of screening,โ
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