Taste perception of cigarette smokers.

In this work we have ventured to establish the dependencies between taste sensitivity for four basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour and bitter and endogenous factors such as sex and age and one exogenous factor, namely cigarette smoking. 471 randomly selected people, including 194 men and 277 women of different age were examined. Individual taste sensitivity was determined in the examined group, by means of saccharose, sodium chloride, acetic acid and quinine solutions. This examination showed that individual sensitivity limits range greatly to encompass varying concentrations of given taste substances. Values of individual sensitivity thresholds for stimulus substances and sensory minimum values obtained in this work showed that a substantial part of the examined people identified individual tastes at concentrations to a great extent exceeding mean threshold values. It can be supposed that those were cases of hypogeusia. There were also some instances of ageusia--a complete lack of sensitivity for sweet and bitter tastes. It was showed that cigarette smoking influences taste sensitivity of the examined people to a small extent. The changes observed were diversified and, in the majority of cases, statistically irrelevant. It can be assumed that taste receptor deficits caused by toxic compounds present in cigarette smoke are compensated by other senses. The conducted research pointed to no particular connection between identification thresholds of four basic senses and the age of the examined people. It can be caused by great diversification of individual threshold values. The research shows that, to a certain extent, taste sensitivity depends on gender. Generally speaking, women exhibit greater taste sensitivity in comparison to men. It seems that these differences are of hormonal nature.