Leon Michael, Woo Cynthia C
Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States.
Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States.
Front Neurosci. 2022 Sep 28;16:1013363. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.1013363. eCollection 2022.
The loss of olfactory stimulation correlates well with at least 68 widely differing neurological disorders, including depression, and we raise the possibility that this relationship may be causal. That is, it seems possible that olfactory loss makes the brain vulnerable to expressing the symptoms of these neurological disorders, while daily olfactory enrichment may decrease the risk of expressing these symptoms. This situation resembles the cognitive reserve that is thought to protect people with Alzheimer's neuropathology from expressing the functional deficit in memory through the cumulative effect of intellectual stimulation. These relationships also resemble the functional response of animal models of human neurological disorders to environmental enrichment, wherein the animals continue to have the induced neuropathology, but do not express the symptoms as they do in a standard environment with restricted sensorimotor stimulation.
嗅觉刺激的丧失与至少68种截然不同的神经系统疾病密切相关，包括抑郁症，我们提出这种关系可能是因果关系的可能性。也就是说，嗅觉丧失似乎有可能使大脑易于表现出这些神经系统疾病的症状，而日常嗅觉强化可能会降低表现出这些症状的风险。这种情况类似于认知储备，人们认为认知储备通过智力刺激的累积效应保护患有阿尔茨海默病神经病理学的人不表现出记忆功能缺陷。这些关系也类似于人类神经系统疾病动物模型对环境丰富的功能反应，在这种反应中，动物继续患有诱发的神经病理学，但不像在感觉运动刺激受限的标准环境中那样表现出症状。
