You are walking through a garden, inhaling the fresh scents of lavender, mint or jasmine. It’s a simple joy, but did you know your sense of smell can reveal a lot about your health? The loss of smell typically occurs five to 10 years before Alzheimer’s more recognizable symptoms, like memory loss and confusion, are diagnosable.
Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease that affects the brain and spinal cord and can lead to the progressive loss of nerve cells or neurons. Eventually, the disease impacts memory, thinking and behavior, but it doesn’t always show up in obvious ways. A decline in the ability to smell is an early sign.
Researchers at Boise State University are developing a virtual reality headset that monitors how well users detect certain aromas and it could help detect the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
“We're just going to go ahead and start with the game. So I'm going to go ahead and have you put this on,” Alyssa Fagundes, one of the medical collective researchers.
I’m testing out the virtual reality platform, helping create a baseline for normal smell function and establish aging, in a small room in the Chrisway Annex building on campus.
Researcher Josie Sheridan, breaks down the test.
“Whatever scent you smell, you're gonna match with your eyes to the picture of it,” she said, “So a scent will come out and you'll smell it and you'll have 15 seconds to track the correct scent to the picture. And once you find the picture and you think that that's the smell, it is, stay on that picture looking at it for the full 15 seconds.”
I see four screen images in the headset and the researchers release an aroma, which matches to an image. They’ve asked not to identify them for this story.
This project has brought together a diverse team of students. Fagundes and Sheridan are on the medical collective team.
“So this team collects data from psych 101 students here at Boise State,” Fagundes explained, “And we use that to kind of compile a baseline of the data, because as you get older, your scent, your ability to detect scent, weakens. And there's also a correlation between that and Alzheimer's. So we just want to establish a baseline.”
Then there’s the engineering team that made the device dispensing the smells and the gaming and interactive mobile media team, also known as GIMM, who designed the game.
The Understanding Alzheimer’s team focuses on public outreach and education. Then there’s the data team, which goes to community centers in the Boise area to test a wide range of participants to determine if they are close to their end goal.
Sydney Boutros, a behavioral neuroscientist in the Psychological Science Department, is one of the newest professors to join the project that started in 2018.
The professors were exploring how to bring the sense of smell into their teaching. They started exploring the history of smells like sulfur and pine at national parks like Yellowstone National Park.
As the project evolved, students discovered that loss of smell often occurs five to 10 years before Alzheimer’s symptoms appear
The loss of smell doesn’t automatically mean one has Alzheimer’s. But as we age, our sense of smell naturally weakens.
For those at risk, however, detecting this change early on can help doctors diagnose it sooner, leading to better treatment options.
A 2022 University of Chicago Medicine study showed that the parts of the brain linked to smell and memory were smaller in people with cognitive decline. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s, but new drugs are helping slow its effects and improve quality of life.
Back in the small room on campus, Sheridan explains once the scent enters my nose, the virtual reality headset tracks my eye movements toward the corresponding object.
“How did that feel? Could you smell a lot of the scents coming in?" asks Sheridan.
“Yeah, that was impressive. Wow,” I add.
After completing the four-step game, I am told I passed and that I appear to be in good health. I then take a post-test questionnaire and complete a survey.
Boutros said she could see this becoming part of someone’s annual physical exam starting in a patient’s mid-40s. The team is still in the validation phase, testing the device on healthy participants to establish a baseline of normal aging before testing individuals with Alzheimer's disease.
“We've also talked about maybe putting it somewhere like pharmacies where people can play this game,” Boutros said, “It's a two minute game while they're waiting for their prescriptions to be filled.”
It’s standard practice to test for vision and hearing, these researchers say adding smell protocols to medical screenings could give better outcomes for individuals and families who might face a diagnosis.
The team will demonstrate their work on Thursday, March 27 and Friday, March 28 at Hackfort as part of Treefort Music Fest.
