A-la peanut butter sandwiches! Just as The Amazing Mumford invokes peanut butter for his magic tricks, researchers at the University of Florida are now turning to the treat for detecting Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages.
Graduate student Jennifer Stamps thought of using peanut butter to test patients for their sense of smell, which could deteriorate with cognitive decline.
"One of the first places in the brain to degenerate in people with Alzheimer’s disease is the front part of the temporal lobe that evolved from the smell system, and this portion of the brain is involved in forming new memories," the university said in a news release.
Stamps and Dr. Kenneth Heilman, the James E. Rooks distinguished professor of neurology and health psychology in the UF College of Medicine’s department of neurology, said this test could be used by clinics that cannot run more elaborate tests.
The university added the peanut butter test will be one more added tool in an arsenal of clinical tests for neurological function in patients with memory disorders.
“We see people with all kinds of memory disorders. This can become an important part of the evaluation process,” Heilman said.
With her colleagues, Stamps, a graduate student in the UF McKnight Brain Institute Center for Smell and Taste, decided to test sensitivity with peanut butter and a ruler.
They reported the findings of a small pilot study in the Journal of the Neurological Sciences.
Stamps said she thought of peanut butter because it is a “pure odorant” that is only detected by the olfactory nerve and is easy to access.
Study details
In the study, patients who were coming to the clinic for testing sat down with a clinician with a tablespoon (14 grams) of peanut butter and a ruler.
The patient would close his or her eyes and mouth and block one nostril. The clinician then opened the peanut butter container and held the ruler next to the open nostril as the patient breathed.
The clinician would move the peanut butter up the ruler one centimeter at a time until the patient could detect an odor.
After recording the distance, the clinician would repeat the procedure on the other nostril after a 90-second delay.
In the study, the researchers found patients in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease had a dramatic difference in detecting odor between the left and right nostril.
The left nostril turned out to be impaired and did not detect the smell until it was about 10 cm closer to the nose than the right nostril.
Patients with other kinds of dementia did not have such a degraded sense of smell, the university noted.
More studies needed
The researchers said more studies may be needed, after noting that of the 24 patients tested who had mild cognitive impairment, 10 showed a left nostril impairment and 14 patients did not.
“At the moment, we can use this test to confirm diagnosis. But we plan to study patients with mild cognitive impairment to see if this test might be used to predict which patients are going to get Alzheimer’s disease,” Stamps said. — TJD, GMA News
source: gmanetwork.com
