Parola S, Liberini P
Section of Clinical Neurophysiology, Brescia General Hospital, Italy.
Ital J Neurol Sci. 1999 Oct;20(5):287-96. doi: 10.1007/s100720050043.
Disorders of the sense of smell are receiving growing clinical as well as experimental attention. Indeed, several neurological conditions have been associated with peripheral or central deficits of the olfactory system. In recent years, particular emphasis has been attributed to the early and severe olfactory impairment in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's dementia and Parkinson's disease. Olfactory assessment has also been included in comprehensive pre- and post-surgical evaluations of temporal lobe epilepsy. Moreover, the request for standardized methods of olfactory evaluation by forensic and occupational medicine is greatly increasing. Despite this requirement, there is no agreement in the Italian neurological community on olfactory assessment. This lack prompted us to generate a battery of standardized tests capable of bypassing cross-cultural differences in olfactory assessment and to be potentially useful in the clinical as well as experimental settings. Procedures of assessment of olfactory acuity (detection threshold), identification (multiple choice odor naming), discrimination (differentiation between similar/dissimilar odorants) and memory (recognition of a substance previously smelled) are fully described. In order to control bias factors depending upon the nature of the investigated disorder and the applied olfactory tasks, a minimal complementary neuropsychological assessment is recommended.
嗅觉障碍正受到越来越多的临床及实验关注。的确，一些神经疾病与嗅觉系统的外周或中枢缺陷有关。近年来，神经退行性疾病（如阿尔茨海默病性痴呆和帕金森病）早期严重的嗅觉损害受到了特别关注。嗅觉评估也已纳入颞叶癫痫的全面术前和术后评估中。此外，法医和职业医学对标准化嗅觉评估方法的需求正在大幅增加。尽管有此需求，但意大利神经学界在嗅觉评估方面尚未达成共识。这种缺失促使我们设计了一套标准化测试，能够绕过嗅觉评估中的跨文化差异，并且在临床和实验环境中都可能有用。本文全面描述了嗅觉敏锐度（检测阈值）、识别（多项选择气味命名）、辨别（相似/不同气味剂之间的区分）和记忆（识别之前闻过的物质）的评估程序。为了控制取决于所研究疾病性质和所应用嗅觉任务的偏差因素，建议进行最少的补充神经心理学评估。
