smell

Can a high-fat diet affect our smell? A new study carried out by Florida State University (USA) and published in The Journal of Neuroscience suggests this.

Alzheimer's disease continues to be one of the most fearful, because it severely affects memory, orientation in time and space, social relationships or even the ability to recognize family members.

Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch

Despite previous estimates that spoke of 10,000 smells, a new study developed by Rockefeller University (USA) has determined that human beings are capable of distinguishing up to 1 billion different smells. The human nose is more powerful than we thought.

Senses such as taste or sight have established a multidimensional systematic scale that helps to understand perception. But what about smell? For the first time, American scientists have specified about ten minimum categories in which odors can be described thanks to the simplification of a statistical model.

According to a study by the Metropolitan University of Santos in Brazil, at least a third of people who suffer from headaches experience an increase in their sensitivity to odors during a migraine attack, a figure that can increase up to 70% in the case of women with migraine. This intolerance to odors, also known as osmophobia, is noted, among other things, in that patients are able to detect odors at a great distance.

We don't just smell using our nose. A team of scientists has just verified that the heart, blood, lungs and other cells of the body have receptors to perceive odors identical to those that exist in the nose. Or put another way, that the ability to smell is not exclusive to the nose.

Each person is able to recognize their own scent thanks to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a unique combination of proteins similar to that used by animals to recognize their partners. These are the results of a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the first to show that humans do indeed 'smell' ourselves.