New research shows that a loss of smell may be a warning sign of Alzheimer’s.
University of Chicago Medical Center found that a decline in a person’s sense of smell may predict their loss of cognitive function and can impact regions of the brain that play an important part in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
Researchers conducted a longitudinal study of 515 older adults which could lead to the development of smell-test screening to detect cognitive impairment earlier in patients.
“This study provides another clue to how a rapid decline in the sense of smell is a really good indicator of what’s going to end up structurally occurring in specific regions of the brain,” said senior author Jayant M. Pinto.
With this study Pinto and his team wanted to see whether it was possible to correlate a person’s loss of smell and cognitive function with alterations in the brain.
Rachel Pacyna, lead author of the paper, said: “Our ideas was that people with a rapidly declining sense of smell over time would be in worse shape – and more likely to have brain problems and even Alzheimer’s itself- than people who were slowly declining or maintaining a normal sense of smell.”
The team also hopes to study the effectiveness of using smell tests in clinics as a preventing and tracking test for adults with signs of early dementia. They also hope that using smell tests will help develop new treatments.
Pacyna said: “If we could identify people in their 40s, 50s and 60s who are at higher risk early on, we could potentially have enough information to enrol them into clinical trials and develop better medications.”
Limitations of the study included only a MRI scan, which meant the study lacked data to understand how structural changes in the brain began or now quickly brain regions shrunk.
