Brief Test of Olfactory Dysfunction Based on Diagnostic Features of Specific Odors in Early-Stage Alzheimer Disease

BACKGROUND: Olfactory impairment is an early symptom of Alzheimer disease (AD). However, it is rarely assessed in clinical practice. This study aimed to assess the identification and discrimination of specific odors in patients with early-stage AD using the Sniffin’ Sticks test and determine the items that would be most valuable in the diagnosis of early-stage AD in order to create a brief test of olfactory dysfunction. MATERIAL/METHODS: Three groups of participants were enrolled, including 30 patients with mild cognitive impairment due to AD (MCI-AD group), 30 with mild dementia due to AD (MD-AD group), and 30 older participants with normal cognition (NC group). All participants underwent cognitive (Clinical Dementia Rating, Mini-Mental State Examination, Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive Subscale, and verbal fluency tests) and olfactory (Burghart Sniffin’ Sticks odor identification and odor discrimination tests) assessments. RESULTS: The MD-AD group scored significantly lower than the MCI-AD group and the MCI-AD group scored significantly lower than the NC group in both the odor identification (P<0.001) and discrimination (P<0.05) tasks. The shortened versions of the odor identification and discrimination tasks showed good diagnostic properties in differentiating patients with AD from the NC participants (receiver operating characteristic [ROC] area under the curve [AUC]=0.912 and 0.954, respectively) and differentiating patients with MCI-AD from the NC participants (ROC AUC=0.871 and 0.959, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: The brief versions of olfactory tests, containing selected items that were found to differ the most between cognitively normal participants and early-stage AD patients, have good diagnostic qualities and can aid clinicians in screening for early-stage AD.