Have you ever smelled fresh food? Or a bouquet of flowers? Or cow manure? When you go out to eat with your parents and they order a bottle of wine, do they swish the wine around and smell it? This smelling —believe it or not— could lead to a lower risk in developing Alzheimers.
Why? Read on and find out.
Something to know before I continue, Dementia is a general term for memory loss and other intellectual abilities.
What is Alzheimers exactly?
Alzheimers accounts for a majority of Dementia cases. Alzheimers affects the brain in such a way that your memory, thinking, and behavior are inhibited in a serious way. Scientists believe Alzheimer’s disease prevents parts of a cell’s factory from running well but, more research is needed because there are still holes that need to be filled before we move forward and try to cure Alzheimers. Essentially, as the damage spreads around the brain, the cells lose their ability to do what they were made to do and die. This is what causes parts of the brain to deteriorate because irreversible changes have been made in the cells.
Now back to how smelling can reduce risk of getting Alzheimers:
What started as a study investigating why wine experts can smell and taste some things that others can’t, turned into a potential breakthrough for Alzheimer’s disease. The director of wine at the Mandalay Resort, Harley Carbery, has been more exposed to using his sense of smell than the usual person. Seeing as Carbery’s profession is wine, he has constantly been relying on his taste and his smell. He has developed an incredible talent (that he gets paid for) and claims that he can detect almost any ingredient in a glass of wine.
Alzheimers usually sets in parts of the brain that we do not use as much. Dr. Sarah Banks, who works for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Brain Health, did brain scans on 13 “wine experts” and 13 “non-experts” as they smelled various scents of wines and fruits. She found that individual’s who were “wine experts” could detect scents that the “non-experts” could not. After conducting this study, Dr. Banks discovered parts of the “wine experts” brains were bigger, including areas susceptible to Alzheimer’s. “The fact that the parts of the brain that are bigger are those parts that are most vulnerable to diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s bodes pretty well for the wine experts,” said Dr. Banks, “It suggests that they might have some degree of protection.”
Using our sense of smell, with wine specifically, could be a major component in the future research for Alzheimers. It may also give us information about how to help prevent other diseases!
In conclusion, try not to rely on your vision as much. Use your other senses and maybe in the future we will find more breakthrough research we thought we would never discover. This potential breakthrough could let our grand kids or their grand kids remember us as we actually are and not what some disease has made us.
Sources:
“Wine Experts Possible Key In Alzheimer’s Research Breakthrough.” CBS Miami. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Sept. 2016.
https://www.google.com/search?q=alzheimers+brain&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwju8siNjpPPAhVIJR4KHRIrAA0Q_AUICCgB&biw=1366&bih=643#imgrc=dJyXvZ1_wIC_3M%3A
Very interesting post. I haven’t ever seen a reduced risk of alzheimer’s linked to smell before, but I have seen it linked to puzzles. Articles like this claim that staying mentally active by doing things like crossword puzzles can reduce the risk for Alzheimer’s disease. I think that it’s really interesting that while we are in search for a cure we can reduce the risk of this disease by doing these simple actions. In any event, I hope that we as a society are close to a cure. Alzheimer’s is a very difficult diagnosis for both the victim and their family.
(Updated version of previous comment)
Who knew smelling different scents could lead to a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s? My grandma has a form of dementia and she is slowly losing more and more of her memory every day. Hopefully this discovery could lead scientists and doctors towards a cure to Alzheimer’s and dementia so people can stop suffering from these awful diseases. An article I found explains that both Alzheimer’s and dementia tend to be genetic diseases. Scientists have tested inserting an antibody into people who have the mutation for Alzheimer’s or dementia. This antibody helps to remove the plaque in the brains that causes these mutations. This is hoped to delay and prevent symptoms of memory loss. The embedded link discusses several other potential ways these diseases can be prevented or delayed.
Who knew smelling different scents could lead to a decreased risk of Alzheimers? My grandma has a form of dementia and she is slowly losing more and more of her memory every day. Hopefully this discovery could lead scientists and doctors towards a cure to Alzheimer’s and dementia so people can stop suffering from these awful diseases. Since these diseases tend to be genetic, there is “an ongoing clinical trial conducted by the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN), [that] is testing whether antibodies to beta-amyloid can reduce the accumulation of beta-amyloid plaque in the brains of people with such genetic mutations and thereby reduce, delay or prevent symptoms” (alz.org ). People who are predicted to have the gene for Alzheimer’s are receiving antibodies before they start having symptoms. The development of these beta- amyloid plaques are monitored by brain scans (Alz.org). The link I embedded discusses a lot of other ways to potentially prevent Alzheimer’s and dementia.
I found this blog very interesting because I have never heard anything about this study until now but also mainly because reading this blog made me make a connection to something I learned today in my HDFS class. We were talking about memory, and how our unconscious minds hold every memory we have ever created, believe it or not, all the way back to when we were born. This was proven in a study with a woman of Russian ethnicity who came to the US and claimed she lost all ability to speak fluent Russian like she used to in her early childhood. The doctors experimented on her to test her memory to see if she could really remember this aspect of her infancy. They searched her brain for the memory linked to that certain part of her life and lit it up. Once they did this, the results were unbelievable. The woman began to unconsciously have a conversation spoken fluently in Russian. This studied proved how once a memory is triggered, it can be clearly remembered as if you were there in the moment again. My professor mentioned how certain things we see, hear, smell, etc. can bring back a memory. She explained however, how smell was proven to be one of the greatest ways to trigger our memories. So it made me think, maybe this study uses smell for this reason? Maybe the people are told to develop/strengthen their sense of smell so once they smell that smell, it’ll trigger memory, making the memory harder to forget.
***In my earlier comment wherever I said unconscious minds, I really meant to say preconscious minds.