An innovative "scratch and smell" test promises to become a powerful new tool for sniffing out mental illness before the onset of symptoms, Australian researchers said yesterday.
A University of Melbourne team said they had discovered a link between a declining sense of smell and disorders such as as schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Matching smells
In a test conducted by health provider Melbourne Health, 81 young subjects at risk of becoming psychotic were shown a series of 40 cards, whose smell they had to match up with a list of four odors such as coffee, roses, oranges and petrol.
The researchers found those who later went on to develop a mental illness had difficulty identifying more than half the odors.
Christos Pantelis, from the university's Melbourne Neuropsychiatry Center, said that this was because such conditions could affect the frontal lobe, the area of the brain that contains the tools to analyze and identify smells.
"An abnormal sense of smell may indicate problems in this thinking' area of the brain," he said.
In the young people who had not yet become ill, the test was able to pick up an impairment in normal development, Pantelis said.
Early indicator
At the other end of the spectrum, the test could help in the early diagnosis of degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's disease, in which frontal lobe ability deteriorated.
"The importance of the test is that it is sensitive very early on in some psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders," he said.
Pantelis hoped that the test, which was currently only used in research, would soon become established as a clinical tool as a result of the team's work.
However, he stressed that it could not necessarily predict later problems on its own, and merely complemented other types of tests that are currently used by clinicians.
"We hope this will be a test that will become more available and will help doctors diagnose," he said.
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