Summary: Rockefeller researchers have developed a new diagnostic test that could help with early detection of disorders associated with olfaction problems, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Source: Rockefeller University.
Nisha Pradhan was seven when she began to suspect she was missing out on something. Her sister seemed to have an uncanny knack for predicting what their mother was making for dinner. Pradhan, meanwhile, never had a clue.
“I would just stare at her,” Pradhan says. “She’s younger than me — how does she know more than I do?”
Now 21, Pradhan knows she has a limited ability to detect odor — including the smell of dinner cooking. Her situation is not unique: The sense of smell is often taken for granted, until it malfunctions.
As a patient in a clinical trial being conducted at Rockefeller University, Pradhan is helping scientists develop new smell tests, which promise to help improve diagnosis because they can be used reliably for anyone, anywhere. Because smell disorders can be linked to a variety of health conditions–interfering with appetite, as well as social interaction and sometimes leading to isolation, anxiety, and depression.
“People have their vision and hearing tested throughout their lives, but smell testing is exceedingly rare,” says neuroscientist Leslie Vosshall.
The new tests, developed by Vosshall along with Julien Hsieh, a Rockefeller clinical scholar, and their colleagues could even aid the early detection of neurological disorders that have been linked to problems with olfaction.
An underappreciated skill
People suffer from smell loss for various reasons — a head trauma or sinus infection, for example, or even a common cold — and the cause can be as hard to pinpoint as the condition itself. In Pradhan’s case, she believes she lost much of her sense of smell as a young child, although she’s not sure how. She brought the issue up with her pediatrician, but never received any testing or guidance.
Both the medical community and the people affected by smell loss can be prone to overlook it. “Olfies,” says Pradhan, referring to people with a normal sense of smell, “think not having a sense of smell just affects our ability to detect gas leaks, smoke, and bad body odor. But it deprives us of so much more, including emotions and memories that are so intimate and integral to the human experience.”
A handful of tests already exist for diagnosing people like her. One problem with these tests is that they rely on a patient’s ability to detect and identify single types of odor molecules, such as rose-scented phenylethyl alcohol. However, the ability to detect odors and to recognize them can vary greatly between people. So, someone with an otherwise normal sense of smell may not be able to detect the rose molecule. Meanwhile, another person who can smell roses but is from an area where these flowers are scarce may struggle to put a name to the scent. In either case, there is the potential for misdiagnosis, particularly when testing across different populations and countries.
The problem of smell
Hsieh and colleagues set out to eliminate these potential biases with the help of “white smells,” made by mixing many odors together to produce something unfamiliar. Just as a combination of wavelengths of light produces white light, and many frequencies of sound make up white noise, the team generated white smells from assortments of 30 different odor molecules. Their two new tests ask patients to distinguish white smells with overlapping ingredients and to detect white smells at increasingly lower concentrations.
If a person is unable to detect a single component of the test scent, this has little effect on the outcome, and test takers don’t need to identify the odor at all. “We’re really excited about these new tests,” says Vosshall, who is Robin Chemers Neustein Professor and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “They focus on the problem of smell itself, because they don’t force people to match smells to words.”
Clinical trials conducted at The Rockefeller University Hospital and Taichung Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan showed that the new tests detected smell loss more reliably than conventional options. The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, open up the possibility of a new means to detect smell loss worldwide. It could be used for detection of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, says Hsieh, now a resident at the Geneva University Hospitals in Switzerland.
“The goal is to use changes in the sense of smell, along with other biomarkers, to identify underlying causes of these neurological disorders very early, and so potentially improve treatment,” he says.
Funding: NIH/National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institutes of Health, Clinical and Translational Science Award Program funded this study.
Source: Katherine Fenz – Rockefeller University
Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Vidhya Nagarajan.
Original Research: Abstract for “SMELL-S and SMELL-R: Olfactory tests not influenced by odor-specific insensitivity or prior olfactory experience” by Julien W. Hsieh, Andreas Keller, Michele Wong, Rong-San Jiang, and Leslie B. Vosshall in PNAS. Published online October 10 2017 doi:10.1073/pnas.1711415114
[cbtabs][cbtab title=”MLA”]Rockefeller University. “New Smell Test Could Aid Early Detection of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 10 October 2017.
<https://neurosciencenews.com/smell-test-alzheimers-parkinsons-7714/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=”APA”]Rockefeller University. (2017, October 10). New Smell Test Could Aid Early Detection of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved October 10, 2017 from https://neurosciencenews.com/smell-test-alzheimers-parkinsons-7714/[/cbtab][cbtab title=”Chicago”]Rockefeller University. “New Smell Test Could Aid Early Detection of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.” https://neurosciencenews.com/smell-test-alzheimers-parkinsons-7714/ (accessed October 10, 2017).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]
Abstract
SMELL-S and SMELL-R: Olfactory tests not influenced by odor-specific insensitivity or prior olfactory experience
Smell dysfunction is a common and underdiagnosed medical condition that can have serious consequences. It is also an early biomarker of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, where olfactory deficits precede detectable memory loss. Clinical tests that evaluate the sense of smell face two major challenges. First, human sensitivity to individual odorants varies significantly, so test results may be unreliable in people with low sensitivity to a test odorant but an otherwise normal sense of smell. Second, prior familiarity with odor stimuli can bias smell test performance. We have developed nonsemantic tests for olfactory sensitivity (SMELL-S) and olfactory resolution (SMELL-R) that use mixtures of odorants that have unfamiliar smells. The tests can be self-administered by healthy individuals with minimal training and show high test–retest reliability. Because SMELL-S uses odor mixtures rather than a single molecule, odor-specific insensitivity is averaged out, and the test accurately distinguished people with normal and dysfunctional smell. SMELL-R is a discrimination test in which the difference between two stimulus mixtures can be altered stepwise. This is an advance over current discrimination tests, which ask subjects to discriminate monomolecular odorants whose difference in odor cannot be quantified. SMELL-R showed significantly less bias in scores between North American and Taiwanese subjects than conventional semantically based smell tests that need to be adapted to different languages and cultures. Based on these proof-of-principle results in healthy individuals, we predict that SMELL-S and SMELL-R will be broadly effective in diagnosing smell dysfunction.
“SMELL-S and SMELL-R: Olfactory tests not influenced by odor-specific insensitivity or prior olfactory experience” by Julien W. Hsieh, Andreas Keller, Michele Wong, Rong-San Jiang, and Leslie B. Vosshall in PNAS. Published online October 10 2017 doi:10.1073/pnas.1711415114
