**Check Out This Surprisingly Good Predictor Of Impending Death
An article written by Roxanne Palmer for the World Science Festival Newsletter boldly declared that “when the Grim Reaper approaches, you won’t be able to smell him coming.” Because “in older adults, losing one’s sense of smell turns out to correlate surprisingly well with a person’s likelihood of dying within a few years, a new study appearing in the journal PLOS ONE found.”
Yep, you’re reading it right: that study found that “losing your sense of smell correlates with a lower survival rate.”
Check out the complete article re-posted below. And don’t stop smelling. No-uh! 
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When the Grim Reaper approaches, you won’t be able to smell him coming. In older adults, losing one’s sense of smell turns out to correlate surprisingly well with a person’s likelihood of dying within a few years, a new study appearing in the journal PLOS ONE found.
Yes, you read that right: Losing your sense of smell correlates with a lower survival rate.
“It’s a very robust finding, where people with no sense of smell had three times the odds of death within five years, compared to people with a normal sense of smell,” says University of Chicago head and neck surgeon Jayant Pinto, the lead author of the study.
The study, part of the National Social Life, Health and Aging Project, assessed the ability of 3,005 participants aged 57 to 85 to identify five common odors: peppermint, fish, orange, rose and leather. The volunteers were tested using devices called “Sniffin’Sticks,” which resemble felt tip pens loaded with scent instead of ink. Five years after running the smell tests, researchers checked in with the participants to see who was alive. 39 percent of people who failed the smell test (scoring 0 out of five) had passed away, compared to just 19 percent of the group who’d correctly identified two or three scents out of five, and just 10 percent of those who were able to recognize four or five distinct smells.
This odds ratio stayed essentially the same even after the researchers corrected for all the other relevant factors–age, gender, smoking and drug use.
“This study is a game-changer: It used a large, carefully recruited population, and applied rigorous statistical analysis to examine the effect from all possible angles,” says Avery Gilbert, a smell scientist not involved with the current study, and a featured expert at the 2011 World Science Festival program “Scents and Sensibilities”.
“Whatever way you slice it, the result is the same,” says Gilbert. “You smell or you die.”
It’s not that losing your sense of smell causes you to die, Pinto is careful to clarify: It’s a correlation, not necessarily a causation. The team thinks the connection might arise because losing your sense of smell is a sign that you’ve been exposed to damaging agents like pollutants that have injured the nerve, but that also might have wider-ranging health effects. An ineffective sniffer may also be a red flag signaling that a person’s ability to regenerate vital cells is breaking down. The olfactory system uses stem cells to repair itself; if that system is unable to rebuild, than there may be other systems throughout a person’s body that are equally unable to combat deterioration. And there are a few ways that losing your sense of smell might directly contribute to a raised risk for death: Without smell, you’re less likely to detect gas leaks, spoiled food, and other dangers not as readily apparent to your other senses.
Could there be ways to restore olfactory function, and reverse other degenerative effects of aging? Pinto points out that there are some studies going on in animals examining whether giving certain growth factors to older subjects helps turn the aging tide back a bit. But these techniques are far from ready for human experimentation.
“Smell is more remarked on in its absence than when it is functioning. Olfactory loss is a dismal experience,” Gilbert says. “If it is indeed a bellwether, as the paper suggests, then ‘stop and smell the roses’ starts sounding pretty profound.” xxx