Early Warning Signs: How Loss of Smell Could Indicate Neurodegenerative Disease #shorts
00:00:00.000 | As you may know, loss of the sense of smell is one of the, if not the earliest sign of neurodegenerative disease.
00:00:06.460 | So for example, in Parkinson's disease, there's loss in the sense of smell probably 10 years before any other symptom.
00:00:13.300 | People have failed to make this a diagnostic tool because it's nonspecific.
00:00:17.980 | So it's not as if you could come to your doctor and say, "I'm losing my sense of smell," and they'll say, "Oh, early sign of Parkinson's,"
00:00:24.520 | because you can have many reasons to lose your sense of smell and so on.
00:00:29.320 | Olfactory loss, again, is an early sign of neurodegeneration.
00:00:32.900 | And there's at least one theory, particularly about Alzheimer's disease,
00:00:37.540 | suggesting that Alzheimer's may be the result of a pathogen that enters the brain through the olfactory system.
00:00:46.540 | Interesting.
00:00:47.260 | It's not, of course, a mainstream or widely accepted theory of any type,
00:00:52.340 | but it just highlights this notion that the nose is a path to our brain.