But it wasn’t clear if this impairment would show up in a test of the sniff response.
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The typical response to pleasant smells would be to sniff and breathe in the scent, while unpleasant odors cause the adverse reaction of limiting the flow of the air through the nose. This could afford autistic children the opportunity to undergo treatment that could significantly improve their condition, which would not be as effective when they were older. 18 children had been diagnosed with autism, whereas the other 18 did not suffer from any medical condition.
While typically developing children had adult-like sniff responses, children with autism had a significantly different sniff response and sniffed equally regardless of if the odor was pleasant or unpleasant. Typically, clinicians don’t diagnose ASDs until around 2 years of age. They also want to determine the earliest age that such a might might be used. Researchers have found a correlation between the olfactory sense in young children and their mental development that could prove to be the key to the crucial task of detecting such a disorder early on.
According to the National Autistic Society, eventually smell would constitute an extra tool in testing autism.
The children without autism changed the way they sniffed the bad odors within 0.3 of a second, the researchers found. They very quickly took smaller sniffs of the bad smells and larger sniffs of the sweet smells.
But researchers in Israel found during a recent trial that children with autism generated an “inappropriate” sniff, spending the same amount of time smelling each opposing aroma.
In addition, the researchers said that increasingly aberrant sniffing was associated with increasingly severe autism symptoms, based on social but not motor impairments. “This is a nonverbal measure, and it only requires breathing.” said Ms. Rozenkrantz.
New findings published in the journal Current Biology reveal that people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may not distinguish between certain smells as easily as other children, suggesting that non-verbal tests related to smell could potentially serve as useful early indicators of ASD. Thus, it can help in diagnosing autism even before the child starts uttering words.
Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist and senior author on the study, definitely thinks it is possible but acknowledges more research is needed.
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The next step in the researchers’ work may be to explore whether the differences in sniffing relate to social difficulties, Rozenkrantz said. You would likely take a big sniff in order to inhale the floral aroma.
