Smelling in the old age

Several authors argued that ageing is accompanied by an impairment of olfactory abilities, i.e., the ability to perceive an odour or a taste. However, beyond this overall effect of age on chemosensory abilities, ageing is accompanied by variability in olfactory performance: the decline of odour perception with age is not uniform across odorants neither across elderly individuals. Decline in odour perception may not be inevitable to the aging individual and that factors secondary to aging, such as poor health status or cognitive decline, may contribute to deficits in odour detectability beyond the age effect per se.