“Smell is a critical sense of human physiology”, as witnessed by a team of researchers led by Jayant Pinto of the University of Chicago (USA), who has concluded that the loss of this sense in adulthood may be an indication that death is near.
Despite the fact that humans depend much less on smell than other mammals, this sense plays a crucial role in both human health and behavior . And it is that our ability to distinguish smells affects a wide range of tasks such as nutrition (food preferences and appetite), environmental risks and of course, smell is part of both our memory and social relationships.
The study, which has been published in the journal Plos One , had the participation of 3,005 people in the period between 2005 and 2006 and house by house evaluated in men and women between 57 and 85 years of age their ability to identify five common but different scents: mint, fish, orange, rose and leather.
After a few years, the researchers ran the same test again in 2010 and 2011 , a period in which 430 of the 3,005 subjects had perished. Comparison of the results of both tests revealed that 39% of the participants who had not passed the first odor test had died before the second experiment .
After adjusting for demographic variables such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, general health, and ethnic origin, they concluded that those with a greater loss of smell from the first test were more likely to die within a period of no longer. to five years .
“We believe that the loss of the sense of smell is like a canary in a coal mine. It does not directly cause death, but it is an omen , an early warning system, that something is very wrong and that the damage has already been done. Our findings could provide a useful clinical test, a quick and inexpensive way to identify patients at higher risk, ”says Jayant M. Pinto, leader of the study.
