Stair Lifts

The ability to understand sights, sounds, and words can be a bi-product of dementia, a new study has shown. Also in some cases, the condition can take away the ability to interpret flavors.

Those that are afflicted with a specific type of dementia, called Semantic Dementia, have a harder time identifying flavors and certain flavor combinations.

The thought process about flavors, such as whether they go together, works in a similar way to the thought process about language. “It’s quite interesting and unexpected that one would find these sensory signals behaving in the same way words or music might behave,” said study researcher Jason Warren, of the University College London. “Flavor information is one example of a complex environmental signal that people can lose understanding about, it’s part of a more general problem,” he said.

The study also suggests that various types of dementia can manifest impairments in different ways. For instance, one patient who had a variant of dementia that resembled Alzheimer’s had trouble differentiating whether two different food samples tasted the same or not. Those with Semantic Dementia did not have this problem.

Dementia is essentially defined by the cognitive decline that can originate from a number of disorders, such as Alzheimer’s. Semantic Dementia is a brain disease that has only recently been discovered, and occurs when areas on the outer region of the brain start to decay. Its occurrence is substantially much rarer than Alzheimer’s, but calculating exact numbers can be difficult because people with the disease might be misdiagnosed as having other cognitive problems.

“My prediction would be that there are likely to be distinct profiles of altered flavor processing in these different diseases,” Mr. Warren said.

Also, while the current study did not directly examine the brain specifically, it suggests areas affected by semantic dementia are involved in how we process flavor. Past studies in healthy people have also shown the same brain areas damaged in semantic dementia are stimulated when people make judgments about flavors.

For the next study, Warren and his team of researchers plan to conduct larger research in various assisted living dementia facilities, looking at brain shifts that occur in dementia patients as their ability to distinguish flavors is tested.

Tags: Alzheimer’s, Semantic Dementia