Nov 10, 2024 18:00:00

It turns out that people with and without a sense of smell breathe differently, which may affect their physical and mental health

Compared to senses such as sight and hearing, smell is a less important sense. In fact, in a 2011

survey , more than half of young people aged 16 to 22 said they would rather lose their sense of smell than lose technology such as their cell phone or laptop. A new study has found that people with and without a sense of smell breathe differently, and that this difference may affect the health of people who have lost their sense of smell.

Humans without a sense of smell breathe differently | Nature Communications
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52650-6

Your Sense of Smell Changes The Way You Breathe, Study Reveals : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/your-sense-of-smell-changes-the-way-you-breathe-study-reveals

The sense of smell is often overlooked, but people who have lost their sense of smell as a result of COVID-19 feel a great sense of discomfort when they are unable to smell food. Research has also shown that elderly people who have lost their sense of smell are three times more likely to die than those who have a good sense of smell, suggesting that the sense of smell actually has a significant impact on the human mind and body.

Previous research has shown that when the strength of the odor in the air weakens, the amount of air inhaled through the nose increases relatively. Also, even while sleeping, if there is a strong odor in the air, the amount of air inhaled through the nostrils decreases. If the way we breathe changes depending on the strength of the odor, it is possible that the presence or absence of a sense of smell also affects our normal breathing.

A research team from

the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel conducted an experiment to measure the 'airflow through the nose' on 21 subjects who had no sense of smell and 31 subjects who had an intact sense of smell. The subjects spent a normal day eating, talking to people, sleeping, etc. while wearing a wearable device that measured the airflow through their nose.

When the subjects' breathing was monitored over a 24-hour period, the smell-control group showed multiple small resistances to each breath, with peaks of inhalation occurring 240 times per hour, whereas the smell-deprived people showed no such peaks, revealing a distinct difference in the way they breathed.

In the figure below, the left (C) is a graph showing the amount of air inhaled by a person without a sense of smell, and the right (D) is a graph showing the amount of air inhaled by a person with a sense of smell. Within the range of the graph, each person takes four breaths, but while the person without a sense of smell only has one peak for each breath, the person with a sense of smell has two to three small peaks for each breath.

It is unclear how different breathing patterns depending on whether or not one has a sense of smell affect people. However, given that human brain function is strongly related to breathing, the research team argued that the presence or absence of smell may have physiological and psychological effects on health as well as quality of life.