Smell test
Name 16 smells from a kit. A poor sense of smell went with higher death rates in older adults.
How to do it
- Take the cap off one pen at a time, in number order.
- Hold the tip about 2 cm under your nose for 3 seconds and sniff.
- Put the cap back, then pick the smell from the four names. Guess if you're not sure.
Your result
This uses the Sniffin' Sticks smell kit: 16 pens, each with one smell. Clinics use it, and Platform Health can send one.
Do you have the 16 pens in front of you?
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What the research found
The 16-pen smell test is a standard clinic test. In 9,139 people with a normal sense of smell, adults up to 40 named about 13.6 of 16 on average, falling to 13.0 in their 50s, 12.2 in their 60s and 11.0 in their 70s. In 2,289 adults aged 71 to 82 followed for 13 years, those with a poor sense of smell had a 46% higher risk of dying within 10 years. Brain diseases such as dementia explained about a fifth of that.
Studied in: 9,139 people aged 5 to 96 in Europe, and 2,289 adults aged 71 to 82 in the US.
- Oleszkiewicz A et al. Updated Sniffin' Sticks normative data based on an extended sample of 9139 subjects. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol. 2019;276(3):719-28. PubMed
- Liu B et al. Relationship between poor olfaction and mortality among community-dwelling older adults: a cohort study. Ann Intern Med. 2019;170(10):673-81. PubMed
- Hummel T et al. 'Sniffin' sticks': olfactory performance assessed by the combined testing of odor identification, odor discrimination and olfactory threshold. Chem Senses. 1997;22(1):39-52. PubMed