Objective: To evaluate odors that discriminate Parkinson patients from healthy persons.

Background: More than 90% of PD patients are diagnosed with olfactory impairment. The investigation of odor impairment is such a non-invasive tool that can be applied in clinical settings in addition to costly diagnostic methods.

Methods: All 266 PD patients and 168 healthy persons were odor investigated with 12 Sniffin’ sticks. Odors were presented in felt-tip pens. The participants could identify the odor in a multiple-choice task from a list of four potential answers.

Results: The identification of the odor of peppermint presented the most problems (44%) in the controls, in the PD group it was pineapple ( 15.8% ). Leather (92.9%) ranked the highest among the odors that was correctly identified by the controls and fish odor ( 71.4 % ) was ranked the highest correctly identified by the patients in PD group. Recognition of the odor of orange increases the chances of being healthy four times, and of the leather 4.7 times, the ability to smell liquorice odor as well as coffee increases the chance 2.6 times.

Conclusions: Brief odor identification tests can be used to discriminate between PD patients and healthy subjects. A brief test of odor identification is a non-invasive, robust and cost efficient method. The odor identification could be used to identify the potential risk group for PD.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/odor-identification-in-pd-patients-and-controls-in-estonian-cohort/