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 percent of people with early-stage Parkinson’s and 85 percent of those with early-stage Alzheimer’s have olfactory dysfunction, according to a 2021 paper in Ageing Research Reviews.Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.AdvertisementAdvertisementExperts 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,” said David Vance, a psychologist and professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.And yet, the sense of smell has gotten short shrift. Of the five classic senses, it is the one many say they valued the least, research shows; one study found that many American students would prefer to lose their smell rather than their hair, phone or little left toe. As a research area, it is also underfunded and understudied.”We are constantly using our sense of smell and we don’t recognize it. It is something that has been in the background since birth, and we’re just constantly using it so we don’t even know that it’s happening,” said Nicholas Rowan, an otolaryngologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. For “people who lose their sense of smell, it’s very, very disruptive to their lives.”AdvertisementAdvertisementBut people can actually regain their ability to smell; it is something we can practice and improve with smell training – repeatedly sniffing different odors – whether or not our smell is impaired.Intriguingly, training the nose also seems to train the brain.Some preliminary …
