An at-home smell test could pave the way for early detection of Alzheimer's disease
Mar 2025, phys.org
What's wrong with UPSIT or Sniffin' Sticks?
"Forced-choice measures", that's what; they don't allow enough measurement of the higher order executive functioning that's so hideously complex in its relation to the deep limbic system.
Recall Bloom's Taxonomy as a scale of cognitive effort, where memorization is the easiest, using the least amount of cognitive power, and then goes up through comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation.
Their new test is called the AROMHA Brain Health Test (ABHT), and it's actually a bunch of tests combined:
- Odor percept identification (OPID) test - participants smell an odor, answer a question, and then choose from four provided odor names (this sounds like the basic UPSIT, which is an odor identification test, and uses multiple choice instead of open-ended)
- Percept of odor episodic memory (POEM) test - participants distinguish between new odors and those presented earlier (so this is a memory test)
- Odor discrimination (OD) test - participants identify pairs of smells as either the same or different (also called a pairwise similarity test)
- ***This is new*** a meta-cognition measure embedded in the odor percept identification tasks, where participants sample the odor and then choose an odor name from a forced choice list of 4 options, but are then asked to evaluate their confidence: “I Guessed,” “I Narrowed Down to Three,” “I Narrowed Down to Two,” or “I Am Certain.”
via Laboratory of Olfactory Neurotranslation at McCance Center for Brain Health, and Department of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital: Benoît Jobin et al, The AROMHA brain health test is a remote olfactory assessment to screen for cognitive impairment, Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-92826-8
Partially unrelated image credit: AdobStockWassertest - Fraunhofer IGB - 2025
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