It’s a sunny afternoon, and you’re walking down the street. Clouds are nowhere to be seen, and birds are singing in the trees. Life couldn’t get any better. But you stand corrected as you stop to smell the roses. The aroma of the flowers fills your nostrils with sweetness, and you inhale even deeper for another whiff. You can do this forever but decide to proceed with your walk. Everything seems to be going well until… what is that smell?! Your perfect day abruptly ends as you stroll past someone’s garbage. Rather than breathing in deeper, you halt all airflow to your nostrils.
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Readjusting to different smells seems like a natural response, but a recent study has shown that this is not the case for those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a brain disorder generally linked to difficulties in social interaction and communication. While people typically adjust to different smells, those who have ASD go right along sniffing the same way when exposed to both pleasant and down-right awful scents. Noam Sobel and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel who conducted the study saw a significant difference in the sniffing patterns between normally developing children and children with autism.
The study, based on the understanding that those with autism have sensory-motor impairments, tested 18 children with ASD and 18 normally developing children. The subjects were presented with both unpleasant and pleasant odors while their sniff responses were measured by an olfactometer, an instrument used to measure odor diffusion and dilution. Results showed that while normally developing children were able to adjust their sniffing within 305 milliseconds of encountering a new odor, children with ASD made no such adjustment. Although they were able to distinguish between different smells, they continued to sniff as usual with no regard to scent.
The sniff test was able to identify children with or without ASD 81% of the time, an impressive number for a test that is completely non-verbal and requires no task to follow. Sobel and colleagues hope that their findings from the study may be used as a foundation to build an ASD diagnostic tool that could be applied to children in the earliest of ages—maybe even a few months old. If such is the case, early detection of ASD would lead the way to more effective intervention.
Feature Image Source: yellowroseportraits
