Gesundheit Again

June 12, 2015 by

By Medical Discovery News

June 12, 2015

Person sneezing

Have you ever noticed that many times sneezes come in threes? Repeated sneezes may be your body’s efforts to get rid of irritants in the nose when the initial sneeze is not strong enough to do so.

Sneezing has different meanings in cultures around the world. The Athenian General Xenophon gave an encouraging speech to his army that went on for an hour until a soldier sneezed. Taken as a favorable sign from the gods, the army proceeded to attack the Persians, but was ultimately defeated and the general killed. One of the Pagan beliefs is that sneezing opened one’s body to Satan or evil spirits, which is how the common response “Bless You” arose. In fact, Pope Gregory VII made the short prayer “May God Bless You” a required response to a sneeze as protection from the Black Plague. As you can see, the sneeze has often been misinterpreted in history.

The sneeze can be divided into two phases. The first phase, called the nasal or sensitive phase, results from a chemical or physical irritation of the tissue lining the nose called the nasal mucosa. This signal is transmitted through nerves to the sneezing center of the brain in the lateral medulla. The second phase begins once a sufficient number of nerves are stimulated. This is when the eyes shut, a deep breath is taken, and the opening between the vocal chords closes, increasing lung pressure to allow an explosive release of air through the mouth and nose. The purpose of the sneeze is to dislodge the irritant from the nose, since an estimated 40,000 microscopic particles are expelled by a sneeze. The speed of a sneeze is estimated to be between 135 and 950 feet per second, or up to 85 percent of the speed of sound.

Allergies, infections, and inflammation of the nose’s mucous membrane (rhinitis) can trigger fits of sneezing. Allergies are the result of an immune response to substances in the environment that do not bother most people, like pollen, pet dander, or bee venom. People with allergies mount an immune response to those substances including the inflammation, which again irritates the nasal passages and causes sneezing. When you have a virus like the cold or flu, the immune response also causes inflammation of the nasal passages, which irritates the nerve endings and leads to the familiar itching and sneezing.

The sneeze is also a way for the body to reboot the environment in the nose, so the nasal mucosa can once again trap particles we breathe in from the environment. Sneezing more than once in a row is often an attempt to eject whatever is irritating the nasal passages when the first sneeze was not successful. This explains why people suffering from allergies sneeze more often, since the allergen they are trying to expel is still around. Other people who routinely sneeze many times in a row may just not have forceful sneezes.

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Not Smelling Death

April 25, 2015 by

April 3, 2015

By Medical Discovery News

Not Smelling Death

This may be Debbie Downer question, but can you guess what condition is most indicative of a person’s imminent demise? It turns out that the strongest predictor of impending death is not cancer, stroke, heart attack, diabetes, or emphysema, but a person’s declining sense of smell.

Scientists at the University of Chicago have revealed that the loss of the sense of smell, officially called olfactory dysfunction, is a significant forecaster of death in older Americans. In this study, 3,005 people aged 57-85 were asked to identify five common scents: peppermint, fish, rose, leather, and orange. Five years later, the health of the same people was evaluated.

As this was an older population, some of the subjects died before the study contacted them again. The surprise was that almost 40 percent of those who died had failed the scent test, identifying only one or none correctly. Anosmia is the technical term for complete loss of the ability to smell, while hyponosmia is the significant (but not total) loss of smell. The mortality rate for those with anosmia was four times higher than for those with normal smell. Those who were hyponosmic had an intermediate mortality compared to normal individuals. So being either anosmic or hyponosmic is associated with an increase in a person’s  mortality. And because of the limited length of this study and the relatively small group examined, the effect on mortality is probably underestimated.

Overall, these results are striking. Since these were older individuals, the possibility of other factors influencing these results was examined. The study ruled out confounding factors such as nutrition, mental health, smoking, alcohol abuse, frailty, and neurodegenerative diseases in the results. Those at a higher risk for anosmia or olfactory loss were males, those who were overweight or obese, and those with a lower socioeconomic status.

While the human sense of smell is not as dominant as in other mammals (such as dogs), it is associated with good health and nutrition. The sense of smell is strongly tied to an array of brain functions and is the strongest sense tied to individual memory. Remembered scents can provoke intense memory responses and can stimulate memories from long ago.

The sense of smell is also highly connected to other parts of the central nervous system. Unique among the senses, normal olfactory function relies on cellular regeneration of the specialized sensory cells lining the inside of the nose. If the olfactory system is not working properly, these cells won’t regenerate like they are supposed to do.

Recently, we reported on a study that determined that human noses are capable of distinguishing between at least a trillion different scents. It now appears that the loss of this ability is an omen of death. The exciting part is that a simple scent test taking less than five minutes could become a powerful new way to identify those at high risk of upcoming mortality and lead to interventions that could prolong people’s lives.

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We Are Out-Smelling Ourselves

January 27, 2015 by

Jan. 16, 2015

By Medical Discovery News

We Are Out Smelling Ourselves

Dogs are commonly known for their strong sense of smell. Their noses can detect when someone is pregnant, has cancer, even blood glucose levels. But the human nose is pretty amazing too. You may already know that smell is the strongest sense tied to memory – it can provoke intense responses and can seemingly bring back memories from long ago. Recently, a study has determined that our noses are capable of distinguishing between at least a trillion different scents, much more than previously believed.

The common theory was that we could only discern about 10,000 different odors, so this new estimate is a huge jump. Compare that with our ability to discriminate between 2.3 and 7.5 million different colors, which vary in wavelength and intensity, and about 340,000 different tones, which vary in frequency and loudness.

Back in 1927, a study proposed that there were four elementary odor sensations with sufficient resolution for humans to rate each elementary odor sensation on a nine-point scale. Doing the math, they estimated the number of discernable odors to be nine to the fourth power or 6,561, which was later rounded up to 10,000. Since then, that number has been accepted in both popular and scientific literature. But some scientists suspected that this number was too low. After all, we have just three receptors for light yet we can see millions of colors. Since human noses have about 400 different smell receptors that work in concert, the number of smells we can perceive is likely to be much higher the original estimation.

Natural odors are usually mixtures of large numbers of diverse components. The scent of a rose is produced by a mixture of 275 components, only some of which are chiefly responsible for the aroma. Researchers tested human ability to smell using 128 different molecules that are odorants, mixing them in many unique combinations. They then asked how much (or how little) two mixtures had to differ before the human nose could detect two separate smells.

Although they used many familiar smells like orange and spearmint, they intentionally mixed them to produce unfamiliar odors. Since this equals thousand to millions of odors, the study used methods similar to those used by political polls that use a sample to represent the general population. Each person was given three vials at a time, each consisting of 10, 20, or 30 different compounds. Two contained the same mix of odors while the third was different. Each subject was asked to smell about 500 different odorants in all.

Two vials of odorants had to differ by at least 49 percent to be distinguished. That means two vials of odorants could be 51 percent identical and humans could still tell them apart! Overall, scientists estimated that the human nose can distinguish at least 1 trillion scent combinations. Keep in mind, however, that this estimation is based on only 128 different odors. In the real world, many more odors exist in varying combinations so the number of smells discernible by the human nose could actually be much higher.  Of course, there was large variability in the abilities of different people to discern different smells.

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