Objective: To determine whether olfactory deficits may be related to the cognitive impairment in de novo Parkinson’s disease patients.

Background: Hyposmia is highly prevalent in the motor phase of Parkinson’s disease. Impaired sense of smell is one of the earliest clinical features in both Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

Methods: The study participants included 86 de novo Parkinson’s disease patients, and we divided two groups with cognitive not impaired (≥26) and impaired (<26) patients by Montreal Cognitive Assessments. We compared the olfactory deficits between two groups using Korean version of Sniffin Sticks test.

Results: Thirty-one (36.9%) of the 84 de novo patients had olfactory deficits. There are no differences among demographic factors including depression, sleep, and body mass index. However, except of odor-threshold score, odor-discrimination (7.45 vs. 6.56, p=0.75), odor-identification (7.54 vs. 6.37, p=0.84), and odor-total score (27.27 vs. 25.92, p=0.35) were lower in the cognitive impaired Parkinson’s disease patients, compared with not impaired patients, although there were no significant differences.

Conclusions: Our study showed that olfactory deficits, especially odor identification and discrimination are more in cognitive impaired patients than not impaired Parkinson’s disease patients, although further studies with large sample size are required to validate our findings.     

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/olfactory-deficits-in-the-cognitive-impaired-de-novo-patients-with-parkinsons-disease/