Although it may seem that smell is a sense with little relevance in our lives, the truth is that we use it to carry out many daily activities. A team of researchers from the University of Dresden has studied how anosmia, or loss of smell, affects people’s lives.
About a fifth of the population has an impaired sense of smell, but very few people complain about it. Is it really important to have this unaltered meaning in the Western world? The work, published in the journal PLoS ONE , concludes that, although the ability to smell is not essential to survive, the loss or decrease of smell generates greater insecurity in social relationships and increases the risk of suffering domestic accidents and suffering from depression .
The researchers conducted an extensive survey in which they compared the habits and social behavior of people with intact sense of smell with those suffering from isolated congenital anosmia. They found that people without smell do not have different culinary tastes, despite not being attracted to the smell of a food. On the other hand, those affected by anosmia develop strategies to avoid domestic accidents: they can never leave the fire burning in the kitchen without being present, since they cannot perceive the smell of burning; and to know if the milk is spoiled they have to give it to someone else to smell . Other everyday gestures like sniffing a shirt to see if it is crying out for a wash are useless for someone with anosmia, who must systematically wash their clothes every so often.
More insecurity in social relationships
In the field of relationships, those affected by anosmia have a social life similar to that of the rest of the population, they mate at the same time and have the same average number of children. However, when they come into contact with people they know little about, they become more insecure. This behavior is explained because smell offers us information about other people, and this communication channel is very important in the first contacts . This could explain that those affected by anosmia have approximately half of sexual relations than the rest, although this result could also be due to the fact that, lacking smell, these people have less interest in sex.
Lastly, it appears that people with anosmia are more prone to symptoms of depression. Recent studies have found a reduction in the olfactory bulb in patients with this disease, so both conditions could be related at a physiological level.
