The Economist digs into a bizarre new medical finding:
You are more likely to die within five years if you cannot recognise common smells than if you have ever been diagnosed with one of those more obviously deadly illnesses. That, at least, is the conclusion of a sobering study just published in PLOS ONE, by Martha McClintock and Jayant Pinto of the University of Chicago.
Dr McClintock and Dr Pinto were prompted to conduct their investigation because they knew olfactory problems can forewarn of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. They are also associated with abnormally shortened telomeres (the caps on the ends of chromosomes), and that shortening is, in turn, implicated in the process of ageing. Moreover, a good sense of smell helps keep people healthy by detecting pathogens and toxins in the air, stimulating appetite, and aiding memory, emotions and intimacy. The researchers therefore had good reason to wonder if measuring smell loss might predict mortality.
James Hamblin digs deeper:
“Obviously, people don’t die just because their olfactory system is damaged,” McClintock said in a Wednesday press statement. Obviously. Unless they do.
Australian musician Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of INXS, famously lost his sense of smell in a mysterious accident in a Copenhagen night club in 1992. He developed depression shortly thereafter and died of asphyxiation five years later in what seemed to be suicide, the culmination of what friends called a slow decline in his mental well-being that began with the accident.
In another angle on just how devastating anosmia can be, Elizabeth Zierah wrote in an essay on Slate about dealing with the aftermath of a stroke at age 30. It left her with deficits including a limp and only partial control of her left hand─but it paled in comparison to the misery of losing her sense of smell after a complicated sinus infection. “Without hesitation,” she wrote, “I can say that losing my sense of smell has been more traumatic than adapting to the disabling effects of the stroke. As the scentless and flavorless days passed, I felt trapped inside my own head, a kind of bodily claustrophobia, disassociated. It was as though I were watching a movie of my own life.”
(Photo by Craige Moore)
The Dish 