Is your nose trying to tell you something about your health? A new study suggests that problems with your sense of smell may be an early warning sign for a surprisingly wide range of medical conditions (at least 139). So, your loss of smell may not be just a minor inconvenience; It could be even more than that.
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The study was published in Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience and found that olfactory loss co-occurs with at least 139 neurological, somatic and congenital/hereditary conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, COVID -19 and others.
Is your nose trying to tell you about your health?
According to studies, our sense of smell may be one of the first systems to signal that something is not quite right with our body. Furthermore, in many cases, loss of smell occurs before the development of other symptoms, sometimes by years. For example, people who later develop Parkinson’s disease may have a decreased sense of smell. Similarly, individuals who develop Alzheimer’s disease often report problems with their sense of smell as one of their earliest symptoms, even before they notice any memory problems.
Another finding that astonished researchers was the connection between the sense of smell and inflammation. According to the study, when researchers looked at all 139 conditions associated with smell loss, all of them involved inflammation in some way.
“It was difficult to track studies for so many medical conditions,” said Michael Lyons, lead author and professor emeritus at the Charlie Dunlap School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine.
Lyon said, “The data is particularly interesting because we previously found that olfactory enrichment can improve older adults’ memory by 226 percent. We now know that pleasant scents can reduce inflammation, potentially pointing to a mechanism by which such scents may improve brain health.
