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. 2023 Apr 13;13(1):6075.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-32878-w.

Properties of odor identification testing in screening for early-stage Alzheimer's disease

Egle Audronyte  1 , Gyte Pakulaite-Kazliene  2 , Vaiva Sutnikiene  2 , Gintaras Kaubrys  2
Affiliations

Properties of odor identification testing in screening for early-stage Alzheimer's disease

Egle Audronyte et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Odor identification (OI) is impaired in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, data regarding the diagnostic properties of OI tests are lacking, preventing their clinical use. We aimed to explore OI and determine the accuracy of OI testing in screening for patients with early AD. In total, 30 participants with mild cognitive impairment due to AD (MCI-AD), 30 with mild dementia due to AD (MD-AD), and 30 cognitively normal elderly participants (CN) were enrolled, and cognitive examination (CDR, MMSE, ADAS-Cog 13, and verbal fluency tests) and assessment of OI (Burghart Sniffin' Sticks odor identification test) were performed. MCI-AD patients scored significantly worse in OI than CN participants, and MD-AD patients had worse OI scores than MCI-AD patients. The ratio of OI to ADAS-Cog 13 score had good diagnostic accuracy in differentiating AD patients from CN participants and in differentiating MCI-AD patients from CN participants. Substitution of ADAS-Cog 13 score with the ratio of OI to ADAS-Cog 13 score in a multinomial regression model improved the classification accuracy, especially of MCI-AD cases. Our results confirmed that OI is impaired during the prodromal stage of AD. OI testing has a good diagnostic quality and can improve the accuracy of screening for early-stage AD.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Odor identification scores in three groups of participants. Bars represent mean values, and error bars represent standard deviations.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Relationship between odor identification scores and ADAS-Cog 13 results.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Performance of odor identification to ADAS-Cog 13 score ratio in differentiating between groups of participants.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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