14 DAY TRIAL // Evidence presented in a new paper in the Journal of the Neurological Sciences suggests that peanut butter could one day help doctors diagnose Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.
The so-called peanut butter test would boil down to asking patients to cover their eyes and then sniff a small cup of peanut butter, one nostril at a time. The goal would be to determine just how sensitive to the smell of peanut butter each nostril is.
Researchers at the University of Florida's McKnight Brain Institute Center for Smell and Taste explain that, according to several previous studies, people who are later diagnosed with Alzheimer's first experience damage to the front part of their temporal lobe.
This brain area controls not just the process of forming new memories, but also the process of picking up on and identifying smells.
Therefore, the people who would have trouble smelling the peanut butter would be considered to have a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia.
This hypothesis is backed up by the fact that, while carrying out a series of experiments, graduate student Jennifer Stamps at the University of Florida found that patients who were later diagnosed with Alzheimer's had to bring a cup of peanut butter about 4 inches (10 centimeters) close to their left nostril in order to be able to smell it.
Apparently, this was because these patients had experienced degeneration on the left side of their brain, which is often the case with Alzheimer's patients.
“At the moment, we can use this test to confirm diagnosis,” Jennifer Stamps explained, as cited by Live Science. “But we plan to study patients with mild cognitive impairment to see if this test might be used to predict which patients are going to get Alzheimer's disease,” she added.
The peanut butter test would especially come in handy in parts of the world where doctors lack access to sophisticated equipment and therefore have trouble reaching a diagnostic in time.