Olfactory testing in parkinsonism

摘要

Nearly 30 years ago, Ansari and Johnson reported that patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) had a poor sense of smell. This finding has now been confirmed many times by use of simple psychophysical tests, and pathological examination reveals extensive degeneration of the olfactory pathways has been shown. According to one of the largest studies, the olfactory bulb is one of the first areas to be affected in PD,long before the substantia nigra. Despite these findings, smell testing is rarely done in clinical practice, partly because of traditional dogma that it's a waste of time and, more importantly, because a validated bedside screening test only became available relatively recently.