Investigation of the effect of Olfactory training in natural, everyday conditions onto the olfactory function

Introduction:

Olfactory disorders are common and can have a variety of causes. Each year approximately 50,000 patients in the ENT clinics due to olfactory errors present in Germany. It is well known that patients with olfactory disorders can better smell after systematically-guided training. Here arises the question whether olfactory training also can improve smell as natural, everyday conditions. This was a room installation ("Osmodrama" – Smeller 2.0; Wolfgang Georgsdorf) used, in which an entire room with up to 64 different fragrances in fast switching is flowed through.

Patients and methods:

After obtaining the ethics vote from the Charité university medicine Berlin, 25 patients in the study were included. All patients had a hyposmia or anosmia of different etiologies. They performed a daily, 15 – 30 minute olfactory training in the Smeller 2.0 for 2 weeks. The olfactory function has been investigated before and 6 weeks after the end of the olfactory training by psycho-physical testing (TDI Score).

Results:

It shows up a significant improvement of olfactory function 6 weeks after the end of full-body smell training in all under testing of Sniffin' sticks test battery. Overall, a clinically significant improvement of the smell was detected in 44% of patients.

Conclusions:

The sense of smell could be improved by an intense, relatively short-term olfactory training under natural conditions. Long term results and comparison of the effect under different training conditions remain to be seen.

Publication History

Publication Date:
23 April 2019 (online)