SMELL AS A PREDICTOR OF DEATH

The Old Rusty Nail

AN E-JOURNAL FOR OLD PEOPLE

Russell Burton, an Old Person

This title is the title of an article on a research study a friend gave me the other day which got me thinking about a previous blog in which I wrote about an interesting physiologic finding that old people smell differently than younger people.  The smell was characterized not a real odor but a different smell.

But, I had forgotten about that smell reference and when I read this title I thought of two other smells.  Certainly, the one which came first is yes when a person dies the corpse if not disposed of properly will put out a pretty heavy odor.  And, an odor I might add is rather distinctive.  Years ago when I was director of a research group at the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine, one of the scientists who worked for me was tardy for work.  As he was a responsible young physician I was concerned.

I phoned his address several times and without an answer I decided to drive over to his apartment and see if there was a problem.  I asked another physician employee, a Lt. Colonel to come with me.  It was a short drive.  When we knocked at his front door and did not get an answer we got the apartment manager to let us in.  When she opened the door she started to go in then she quickly closed it saying he was taking a shower. 

My physician friend caught an odor which had come out of the slightly opened door and told the manager that we had better go in for he suspected something was wrong.  And, indeed something was wrong for the person we were looking for lay dead on the bathroom floor with hot water running from the shower.  The odor was unmistakable and hard to describe but the physician picked up on it with only a slight sniff.

But when you think about it the smell of a dead person is not a predictor of death it is an identifier of death.  Something quite different so that left me with but one smell left which is the inability of old people to detect any odor, fragrance, scent, aroma, whiff, or stink which of course is our sense of smell. Better had the author been more explicit in her title like “Sense of Smell….’.   

The title of the study reported on by Smitha Mundasad of the BBC News was ‘Science of Smell May Predict Lifespan’.  Once again why was the ‘sense of smell’ not included in the title? Anyway, this study on the ‘sense of smell’ was a survey of 3,000 individuals in which 39% with the poorest sense of smell (4-5 errors) were dead in within 5 years compared with moderate smellers 19%  and good smellers (0-1 errors) only 10% had died.

She noted that this study accounted for age, smoking habits, poverty, nutrition and overall health all of which are difficult to control for but I guess it was done. Unfortunately those details were no included. Now when an important detail such as that is left out I begin to wonder about its credibility.  Still, it was fun reading and did relate to us old people so here goes my take on it.

The odor of the oranges was the first to go so I guess a good habit would be to each morning cut an orange in two and catch that fragrance if you can.  If you can’t better begin to write you’re Memoirs, Living Will, and the real Will.   Oh yes, decided what you want your survivors to do with your cold dead body.

And, something else, you might want to consider what kind of memorial service you wish to have, if any.  I write ‘if any’ because I am not sure I want one.  To begin with they tend to be morbid by definition.  Now I have been to some where the theme was along the line of a ‘celebration of that person’s life’.  I have always had a difficult time with that title with celebration in it for somehow a celebration does not seem appropriate.  Still, I understand the attempt here is to cheer up the occasion because morbidity, a natural occurrence, does need more smiles and less tears.

Back to that study which found some 39% dead within five years after the sense of smell was no longer considered up to par. Of course you must realize that 61% of the time you will be wrong.  In fact those 61% still alive might have out lived the good smellers. Oh well…

In that regard my mother lost her sense of smell when she was a young girl probably when she had a serious case of pneumonia.  In those days without antibiotics any case of pneumonia would be considered serious.  Besides losing her sense of smell the disease resulted in her having a residual lung disease which required surgery to correct it which she did in her late forties.  No her sense of smell did not return.

Still her lack of smell did not prevent her from being a rather good cook for I understand that taste and smell are closely related. Now for me as a late teenager living at home her inability to smell was welcomed when I would come home at night after drinking a few beers.  Yes, she could not smell alcohol on my breath!

Like most clinical studies this one really raises more questions than provide answers to why the sense of smell would be compromised with age which in turn predicted the occurrence of death.  One explanation put forth was that it indicated that replacing olfactory cells in the nose is slowing down an indication that replacing other cells might also be on the decline.  Now, slowing down cell replacement growth with age is not an astounding discovery.  I bet most all types of cells are being replaced at a much slower rate.  You know all of our bodily functions are slowing down which is sometimes referred to as physiologic aging.

Still this was an interesting study which might have some implications as a clinical tool to ‘identify patients at risk’ of dying within the next few years.  Of course, when we get to be old we are all at considerable risk of dying. That is, a good clinical tool is simply to look at our birth date and at what age did our parents die will give one a pretty good indication of life expectancy a subject I wrote about several blogs back.

This smell thing has peeked my interest.  I think I will go to the kitchen and cut open an orange. Oh my I don’t have any in the house.  So, I will go down to the grocery store and buy some and list the bill as a medical expense on my Income Tax.

11/14