Brain Health with Virtual Reality: The Connection Between Smell and Alzheimer's Disease

In the United States, there are over 600,000 cases of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) diagnosed each year. AD is a neurodegenerative disorder that results in memory loss, cognitive decline, and mood disruption. The average age of diagnosis is 65; yet when diagnosed, the disease has significantly progressed, with a 45% decrease in brain mass. This highlights an important need to identify AD earlier. It is known that scent recognition declines 5-10 years before the hallmark symptoms present. Thus, testing smelling capacity may help determine the presence of AD sooner. This would allow providers to begin treatments at a much earlier stage, delaying the progress of the disease. We are working on a way to make testing smell faster and easier. We developed a device that dispenses scents while participants are in virtual reality to measure participants' scent recognition. Initial testing confirmed that identifying scents is hard. Thus, we are searching for smells that are easily recognizable. We also study if training improves scent identification. This study aims at improving the reproducibility of our method as a next step towards detecting AD at an early stage.