Imagine my excitement, then, when I scroll through my feed to see an article on congenital anosmia. In a national newspaper! In the headlines! Where people will read it! I was actually really happy to see the science team suggest this topic (thanks guys). But this excitement quickly turned sour when I saw that it’s in the news because it’s been linked to increased mortality. Just what I like to find out on a Tuesday morning. But by then I’d started reading, so I had to know more.
A new study has found that when people smell something, particularly something nice, more air comes through their nostrils in a sudden ‘peak’. This is involuntary, since it happens during sleep as well. In contrast, people have no peaks of inhalation in odourless environments. Anosmic people’s breathing, then, is just like that of someone who never leaves an odourless room. Though the overall airflow is the same (we’re thankfully not choking to death) we have fewer peaks of air and take longer pauses between breaths. In short, our breathing pattern is inherently different.
Why is this linked to death? Before, I would have said death by mouldy spinach, or undetected gas leak. And even after reading this you could guess that getting less air is a Bad Thing. But it’s actually because airflow impacts brain activity, such as memory and deciphering facial expressions, which is in the long-term associated with poor health outcomes, according to the study.
I’m not quite sure what to do with this information. Until now anosmia was just this thing that didn’t really bother me but is a bit of a hassle to tell people about. And now it will kill me? I’ll admit that it did scare me at first, especially considering I tend to freak out easily anyway. I do always forget to do my dishes... But honestly, I’ve never been able to smell and I’ll never be able to do anything about it, so why bother panicking? There’s a lot more to panic about in this world. And besides, as I will gleefully tell my housemates, now I have a true excuse for not doing the dishes.
