Your nose reveals whenever you’re going to die [Mad Science]

Have you stopped having the ability to identify familiar smells? You then might be about to die, in keeping with a new study.

A group of scientists studied a set of over 1,000 older those that weren’t sick or suffering dementia. They gave everybody a test to peer how well they might identify 12 familiar odors. Those with the lowest scores had a far higher probability of dying over a higher year than folks that couldn’t.

According to the journal Chemical Senses, where the researchers published their findings:

Olfactory scores ranged from 0 to 12 correct (mean = 9.0, SD = 2.2). In an initial analysis, risk of death decreased by about 6% for each additional odor correctly identified (hazard ratio = 0.94; 95% confidence interval: 0.90, 0.98). Thus, mortality risk was about 36% higher with a low score (6, 10th percentile) compared with a high score (11, 90th percentile). The association persisted in subsequent analyses that controlled for naming ability, disability, cerebrovascular disease, characteristic patterns of leisure activity, depressive symptoms, and apolipoprotein E genotype. The effects indicate that difficulty identifying familiar odors in old age is associated with increased risk of death.

via PubMed (spotted by Steve Silberman )

Image via Shutterstock.

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This post is tagged: characteristic patterns, confidence interval, depressive symptoms, initial analysis, leisure activity, mortality risk, steve silberman