How 'smell training' can boost your brain and flag dementia risk

[canetoad]

Stopping to smell the roses is good life advice. And research suggests it may have an added benefit: it could be a good way to improve your brain health.

The loss of the sense of smell is often one of the first warning signs of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease even up to a decade before there are other diagnosable symptoms. Overall, 90 per cent of people with early-stage Parkinson’s and 85 per cent of those with early-stage Alzheimer’s have olfactory dysfunction, according to a 2021 paper in Ageing Research Reviews.

Experts believe losing our sense of smell, or olfaction, may be a biomarker of declining brain health and are working to make smell testing more commonplace to speed up a diagnosis.

“If someone has horrible olfaction, that seems to be like the canary in the mine where it’s a bellwether that there might be some cognitive problems that may occur later on,” says David Vance, a psychologist and professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

https://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/how-smell-training-can-boost-your-brain-and-flag-dementia-risk-20260715-p60ff7.html

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