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Results for “Olfaction Disorders”

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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

[Olfaction disorders: preliminary findings and results in 45 cases].

In this work we present the preliminary results of a retrospective study on 45 cases of disordered sense of smell. Our approach is based on a diagnostic tripod--a thorough history (with a questionnaire for evaluation), clinical examination (nasal endoscopy), and imaging. The mean age of our patients was 42.6 years, and 60% were male. In the aetiological factors there was a predominance of naso-sinus disease (62.2%), especially inflammatory (polyposis of the nose and sinuses), while general causes (metabolic and drug-induced) accounted for 24.4%, and neurological causes a further 13.3% of cases. Treatment resulted in a favourable outcome (with partial or total recovery) in 71.1% of cases, and failed in 26.6%.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Odor perception in patients with mood disorders.

BACKGROUND: Olfaction has obvious correlates with emotional processes but little is known about the several aspects of olfaction in psychiatric disorders characterized by mood disturbance. This research aims at pointing out the specificities of olfactory perception in patients in order to identify the specific cerebral impairments involved in these disorders. METHODS: Olfactory sensitivity, detection, identification, self-evaluation of intensity and pleasantness have been recorded in a control group of healthy subjects (N = 58) and in three sample populations admitted to a Psychiatry Department: depressive patients (N = 49), anorectic patients (N = 17), and patients suffering from addiction to alcohol or drugs (N = 21). RESULTS: Depressive patients have a poor sensitivity, poor detection abilities but over-evaluate the pleasantness of odors. Anorectic patients have a high sensitivity, over-evaluate the intensities of the odors but under-evaluate their pleasantness. Alcoholic/drug addicted patients showed impairments in identification. LIMITATION: This study does not identify inter-individual differences in olfactory perception. CONCLUSION: The psychiatric diseases, here at hand although every one of them may be characterized by depressive components, show diverging impairments in olfactory perception. When variations in sensitivity are usually attributed to peripheral cues, impairments in emotional and cognitive aspects of olfaction are typically related to specific brain structures and processes which could be particularly involved in these diseases.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1984

Mirror movement: application of movement-related cortical potentials.

In a patient with Kallmann's syndrome (hypogonadotropic hypogonadism and anosmia) manifesting mirror movement, cortical potentials associated with unilateral and bilateral simultaneous voluntary middle finger extensions were studied. Premovement negative slope, which has been shown to reflect preparatory excitation of motor cortex corresponding to the voluntary movement, was recorded bilaterally in this patient in spite of intended unilateral hand movement. It is suggested that mirror movement in this particular patient is generated by unintended excitation of the opposite motor cortex.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Cortically evoked motor responses in patients with Xp22.3-linked Kallmann's syndrome and in female gene carriers.

Patients with Kallmann's syndrome show hypothalamic hypogonadism, hyposmia, and congenital mirror movements. As a correlate, a defect of gonadotropic neuron migration into the brain was recently detected. Considering abnormal outgrowth of neurons also as a possible substrate underlying mirror movements, we studied 3 patients and 2 asymptomatic female gene carriers from a kindred with proven linkage to Xp22.3, using focal transcranial magnetic stimulation of motor cortex hand areas with a figure-eight coil. In all 3 affected brothers, bilateral responses could be evoked almost simultaneously in their thenar muscles (slight latency differences were statistically insignificant). In contrast, the mother and the maternal aunt showed only unilateral, normal thenar responses, even with maximum tolerable stimulator output and high signal amplification. Correspondingly, mirror movements were present in the patients, but not in the gene carriers. Bilaterality of cortically evoked hand muscle responses and mirror movements, therefore, behaved as X-chromosomal recessive traits. A likely cause might be a disorder of neuronal outgrowth in the motor system, particularly of inhibitory callosal fibers. For normal anatomical development of the motor system, one intact Xp22.3 gene seems necessary.

Agenesis of Corpus Callosum↗
PubMed2005

The prevalence of allodynia, osmophobia and red ear syndrome in the juvenile headache: preliminary data.

The aim of the study was to determine the frequency of clinical allodynia, osmophobia and red ear syndrome in a young population. Medical records of the children admitted for headache between 1 December 2004 and 31 March 2005 were consecutively studied. A questionnaire was used to find the prevalence of allodynia, osmophobia and red ear syndrome. We visited 96 children with headache. The range of age was 6-18 years. We classified migraine in 57%, other primary headaches in 25% and secondary headaches in about 18%. The presence of ipsilateral clinical allodynia was 14.5% in migraine, osmophobia in 20% of migraine and red ear syndrome in about 24% of migraine cases and they were absent in the other two headache groups. Our study shows that features like osmophobia, allodynia and red ear syndrome are not uncommon in migraine while they are absent in other types of headache.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1991

Olfactory acuity in the positive and negative syndromes of schizophrenia.

The olfactory thresholds of 46 schizophrenic subjects were measured. This group yielded 11 patients with a stringently defined positive syndrome and 12 with a negative syndrome when rated with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. The negative group had a significantly (p less than 0.01) higher olfactory threshold than the positive group although neither of the groups differed significantly from a control group. Implications of this finding are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1983

Olfactory functioning in temporal lobectomy patients.

Seventeen patients who received unilateral excision of the temporal lobe for intractable epilepsy were compared to 46 normal controls on a battery of tests of olfactory functioning. Tests included quality discrimination, immediate and delayed recognition memory, matching an odor to its visually or haptically presented source, and verbal identification of odors and the function of stimulus objects. In spite of clinically normal absolute sensitivity, the patients performed significantly worse than controls on all tests of olfactory functioning. There were no significant differences in performance between dominant and non-dominant lobectomy patients. Likely explanations for the uniformly impaired performance of patients include deficits in quality discrimination and minor lapses of attention.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Olfactory dysfunction occurs in transgenic mice overexpressing human tau protein.

Disorders of olfaction are among the first clinical signs of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD). In this study, we employed an odor habituation paradigm to evaluate the olfactory function of T alpha 1-3RT transgenic mice that overexpress tau, a key pathogenic protein in AD, and compared such function to that of wild-type controls who do not overexpress this protein. The T alpha 1-3RT mice, but not the controls, exhibited responses indicative of decreased olfactory function. These data lend support to the notion that tau may be involved in the pathogenesis of the olfactory dysfunction of some neurodegenerative diseases. Future studies need to similarly assess other pathogenic markers, as well as their distribution within various sectors of the brain, to determine the specificity of this phenomenon.

Animals↗
PubMed2004

Olfactory deficits in HIV-infected patients with and without AIDS dementia complex.

The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of HIV infection on odour memory. Recognition and identification olfactory tests were administered to six groups of patients defined according to a decrease in cellular immunity: asymptomatic HIV seropositive (HIV+), symptomatic HIV+, HIV+ AIDS, and three groups with a mild, moderate, and severe degree of dementia (AIDS dementia complex [ADC]). Consistent with the literature, the general results show that HIV infection is associated with a decrease in olfactory ability. In addition, a polynomial linear trend analysis indicates a constant decrease in performance from the first to the sixth group of patients, related to the number of CD4 T lymphocytes circulating and to the severity of the pathology. An interesting result regards the drop in performance exhibited by ADC patients on the identification task. Reasonably, such an effect is not attributable to a decline in olfactory ability only, bit rather to a severe semantic memory deficit. It follows that the two tasks used here can be useful clinical supports to discriminate between the mental operations involved in a low cognitive demand task (recognition) and in a high cognitive demand task (identification).

AIDS Dementia Complex↗
PubMed1999

Orbitofrontal cortex dysfunction in obsessive-compulsive disorder? II. Olfactory quality discrimination in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

BACKGROUND: Olfactory quality discrimination is a putative marker of orbitofrontal cortex function in mammals. As this portion of the cerebral cortex was repeatedly implicated in the pathophysiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) this study was designed in an attempt to quantify this behavioural function in OCD patients. METHODS AND RESULTS: Olfactory quality discrimination was compared in OCD patients and healthy controls. Thirty two subjects participated in the study: 16 (13 women and 3 men) medication free OCD outpatients and 16 sex and age matched healthy controls. Olfactory tests consisted of determination of detection thresholds to isoamyl acetate, and a three way forced choice quality discrimination task, using isoamyl acetate, citral and eugenol as stimuli. No significant differences in sensitivity and performance of the quality discrimination task between the two groups were found. Within the OCD group the more severely affected patients (Y-BOCS>29) performed significantly better than the less severely affected (Y-BOCS<30) patients on the more difficult part of the quality discrimination task. Within this subgroup of patients the correlation between performance on the olfactory task and a previously reported alternation task tended to be negative as compared to a significantly positive correlation in the control group. CONCLUSIONS: It seems that olfactory quality discrimination may prove to be a useful noninvasive marker of prefrontal cortex function in OCD. Furthermore, the organization of functional modules within the orbitofrontal cortex, rather than a simple dysfunction, may prove to characterize OCD.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Impairment of olfactory identification in obsessive-compulsive disorder.

BACKGROUND: Olfactory identification ability has been associated with processing in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), an area that has been implicated in the pathophysiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Although olfactory sensitivity is normal in patients with OCD, no study has investigated olfactory identification in this disorder. METHODS: A group of 20 subjects with OCD and 23 age- and education-matched controls performed a standardized test of olfactory identification. They also performed computerized tests of spatial memory span, spatial working memory and spatial recognition memory that have been shown previously to be sensitive to cognitive deficits in patients with OCD. RESULTS: Performance on the olfactory identification task, spatial recognition task and spatial span task was significantly worse in the OCD group than controls. CONCLUSIONS: While impairment in spatial cognition is consistent with previous studies of OCD, its significance for brain-behaviour models of OCD is unclear. However, the finding of abnormal olfactory identification in patients with OCD is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a disruption to processing at the level of the OFC in the disorder.

Adult↗