Hunter Stephanie R, Lin Cailu, Nguyen Ha, Hannum Mackenzie E, Bell Katherine, Huang Amy, Joseph Paule V, Parma Valentina, Dalton Pamela H, Reed Danielle R
Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, PA, United States.
National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Section of Sensory Science and Metabolism & National Institute of Nursing Research, Bethesda, MD, United States.
Chem Senses. 2024 Jan 1;49. doi: 10.1093/chemse/bjae025.
SCENTinel, a rapid smell test designed to screen for olfactory disorders, including anosmia (no ability to smell an odor) and parosmia (distorted sense of smell), measures 4 components of olfactory function: detection, intensity, identification, and pleasantness. Each test card contains one of 9 odorant mixtures. Some people born with genetic insensitivities to specific odorants (i.e. specific anosmia) may fail the test if they cannot smell an odorant but otherwise have a normal sense of smell. However, using odorant mixtures has largely been found to prevent this from happening. To better understand whether genetic differences affect SCENTinel test results, we asked genetically informative adult participants (twins or triplets, N = 630; singletons, N = 370) to complete the SCENTinel test. A subset of twins (n = 304) also provided a saliva sample for genotyping. We examined data for differences between the 9 possible SCENTinel odors; effects of age, sex, and race on SCENTinel performance, test-retest variability; and heritability using both structured equation modeling and SNP-based statistical methods. None of these strategies provided evidence for specific anosmia for any of the odors, but ratings of pleasantness were, in part, genetically determined (h2 = 0.40) and were nominally associated with alleles of odorant receptors (e.g. OR2T33 and OR1G1; P < 0.001). These results provide evidence that using odorant mixtures protected against effects of specific anosmia for ratings of intensity but that ratings of pleasantness showed effects of inheritance, possibly informed by olfactory receptor genotypes.
SCENTinel是一种用于筛查嗅觉障碍的快速嗅觉测试，包括嗅觉丧失（无法闻到气味）和嗅觉异常（嗅觉扭曲），它测量嗅觉功能的四个组成部分：检测、强度、识别和愉悦度。每张测试卡包含9种气味混合物中的一种。一些天生对特定气味剂有遗传不敏感的人（即特定嗅觉丧失），如果他们闻不到某种气味剂，但其他方面嗅觉正常，可能会测试不通过。然而，大量研究发现使用气味混合物可以防止这种情况发生。为了更好地了解基因差异是否会影响SCENTinel测试结果，我们让具有遗传信息的成年参与者（双胞胎或三胞胎，N = 630；单胎，N = 370）完成SCENTinel测试。一部分双胞胎（n = 304）还提供了唾液样本用于基因分型。我们检查了9种可能的SCENTinel气味之间的数据差异；年龄、性别和种族对SCENTinel测试表现的影响、重测变异性；以及使用结构方程模型和基于单核苷酸多态性（SNP）的统计方法进行的遗传力分析。这些策略均未提供任何一种气味存在特定嗅觉丧失的证据，但愉悦度评分部分由基因决定（h2 = 0.40），并且与气味受体等位基因名义上相关（例如OR2T33和OR1G1；P < 0.001）。这些结果表明，使用气味混合物可防止特定嗅觉丧失对强度评分产生影响，但愉悦度评分显示出遗传效应，可能受嗅觉受体基因型影响。
