Last January, Stephanie Meehan, a 49-year-old children’s nurse from Wigan, noticed to her dismay that her sense of smell seemed to have disappeared virtually overnight.
Initially, the most noticeable impact was on the taste and appeal of food and drinks. A surprising degree of our ability to sense flavours comes from odours drifting up from the mouth into the nasal cavity as we chew. Without the sense of smell, food can start to taste like cardboard.
“I’m a big foodie and love eating just about everything,” says Meehan. “Rewards and treats for me were going out to eat, making a nice curry, or having cocktails with friends. But all that went away.”
‘It affects every part of my life’
Over the past year, this prolonged inability to smell began to take an increasing toll on her wider quality of life, and mental health, due to the intrinsic connection between smell and so many emotional experiences. “It truly is a miserable existence,” she says. “It affects every part of my life. I miss the smell of my partner’s aftershave, the smell of my kids when I hug them. My partner often says there’s no point making something nice for tea or eating out if I can’t enjoy it, so he’s stopped doing those things too with me.”
The root cause has been difficult to pinpoint. One possibility is the development of growths, known as nasal polyps. Meehan herself suspects it might be connected to the menopause and wider inflammation, having also recently been diagnosed with asthma.
Stephanie Meehan noticed that her sense of smell seemed to have disappeared virtually overnight in January 2025Yet loss of smell, whether it’s a dramatic, overnight change – such as that experienced by Meehan – or a slow dulling over time, affects a large proportion of us, especially as we get older. It was highlighted at last year’s British Society for Research on Ageing, a gathering of some of the world’s most eminent ageing experts. Research suggests that some degree of smell loss affects 50 per cent of 65- to 80-year-olds, and a staggering 80 per cent of those over the age of 80. Because this often progresses subtly, less than 25 per cent of these people are aware that their ability to smell has diminished.
According to Carl Philpott, professor of rhinology and olfactology at the University of East Anglia, some of this is related to the natural biology of ageing.
The connection with ageing
When a fragrance wafts up our nostrils, it stimulates nerves called olfactory neurons, which in turn connect to the olfactory bulb, a structure in the brain where scents are processed, creating the sensation of smell. From our mid-sixties onwards, it appears that the numbers of glomeruli – spherical structures in the nose which help to relay these signals from olfactory neurons to the brain – begin to wane. “Basically, the ageing process sort of works against our sense of smell after the age of 65,” says Philpott.
But what has also become apparent is that our sense of smell is also heavily linked to our wider health as we age, and even how long we’re likely to live. One study found that over-65s with an impaired ability to smell were more than three times more likely to die within five years than those with normal smelling capabilities. A diminished ability to smell has also been linked to more than 100 different health conditions, ranging from depression to cognitive decline, neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and dementia, cardiovascular disease, arthritis and frailty.
Why? There are a number of reasons. In some instances, smell loss may also reflect more serious underlying problems such as high blood pressure which can damage the fragile blood vessels and nerves in the nose. The location of the olfactory nerves also means that they’re particularly vulnerable to various pollutants and environmental toxins which could be driving damage across the wider central nervous system. “Their failure might act as an early warning that your nervous system is struggling,” says Rebecca Taylor, a biologist who runs a research group at the University of East Anglia, and studies the link between smell and ageing.
There are growing concerns that for people whose sense of smell becomes affected in mid-life, perhaps due to viral infections such as Covid and flu, or other causes such as hormonal changes, this impaired sensory ability can drive problems with their long-term effect. Neuroscientists have long known that people with hearing loss are at a greater risk of dementia, and it appears that the same may be true for smell.
In a 2021 study, where scientists in San Diego examined the health records of 497 people, they found that their performances on various smell tests served as a remarkably accurate predictor for who was likely to go on and develop Alzheimer’s. This is perhaps not as surprising as it might seem. The olfactory bulb – the brain’s smell centre – is directly connected to the main memory and emotional hubs, which is why certain smells can often trigger strong emotions and recall. Researchers believe that if this stimulation is taken away, these hubs steadily shrink and atrophy over time, with impacts on both mental and cognitive health.
Not only that but because smell is so intrinsically linked to the pleasure we derive from food, studies have shown that people who lack the ability to smell tend to eat poorer diets which then makes them more prone to becoming frail and in poorer physical health in later life. Meehan says that since losing her smell, she’s taken to adding salt to most of the foods she eats to try and increase the flavour.
“People without a sense of smell will tend to eat foods with higher salt and sugar content, because those are things they can detect through basic tastes,” says Philpott. “But it means you’re more likely to have an unhealthy diet.”
How to fix it – at home
With this in mind, there has been an increased interest in finding new ways of restoring waning smell, and perhaps boosting our wider health in the process. Some researchers in California are carrying out an experimental treatment which involves injecting tiny blood cells called platelets, extracted from a person’s blood, into their nose to try and regenerate damaged tissue. Philpott is part of an international group working on so-called smell implants, devices that may one day be able to restore smell in a similar manner to how cochlear implants can restore hearing.
But there’s also a simple practise which anyone can do in their own homes, that has been shown to be remarkably effective at overcoming smell loss. Known as smell training, it involves sniffing a variety of odours for a few minutes each day, and repeating this over a period of at least three to four months, and ideally a year. Persistence seems to be especially important – one study found that 70 percent of people with smell loss who stuck to the training for more than a year experienced significant boosts in their ability to smell, compared with 58 per cent of those who do it for just four months.
According to Philpott, the idea is that the repeated stimulation can encourage regeneration of some of the damaged or lost cells within the nose, and encouraging them to reconnect with the pathways which lead to the brain. “The basic principle is to take at least four odours, and spend a couple of minutes in the morning and evening sniffing them, and rating them on a scale of zero to 10 in terms of the intensity you can detect them,” he says. “It’s been shown in numerous studies to be effective.”
The four odours most commonly used in research and commercial smell training kits are clove, eucalyptus, rose and lemon, but Philpott says it’s best to use smells that you were previously familiar with, as well as a range of different odours, whether that’s spices or essential oils.
“It’s quite a simple process really,” he says. “You can basically open the cupboards in your kitchen and bathroom at home and find things that you can train with. It’s probably good to have a couple of food odours and a couple of non-food odours, but it’s most important to have a range of things that are slightly different to each other in terms of their smells, so I wouldn’t pick four floral smells for instance.”
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But smell training isn’t only a treatment. Stopping to smell the roses could also be useful in actually preventing age-related smell loss. Researchers like Taylor now view our smelling abilities as being somewhat akin to our muscles – the more we actively use them, the more potent they are. “We think of ‘use it or lose it’ in the context of muscle, and it’s not a mantra we tend to use in the context of the senses, but maybe it should be,” she says. “There is some evidence out there that actively going out of your way to sniff things, might potentially help you keep your sense of smell for longer, and benefit your brain by doing so.”
Different clinical trials have even suggested that smell training can actually reverse some signs of cognitive decline and promote regrowth in brain regions linked to memory such as the hippocampus. According to Duncan Boak, chief executive of the charity SmellTaste, the key thing is to try and spend a few minutes of your day, doing what he dubs mindful smelling.
“A lot of the time we smell without really being aware that we’re doing it,” he says. “It’s something that happens in the background for lots of people. But what we’re saying is try to actually have some time of day where you’re focused on your sense of smell, where you’re paying attention to what you’re smelling, and asking yourself, ‘Can I smell this? Does it smell the way it should?’”
Given the importance of smell when it comes to the ageing process, Boak is also keen to see smell assessed more as part of regular health check-ups. “It could have some real benefits, because it could enable more serious health issues to be identified sooner, enabling faster treatment for people, and saving the health service money as well,” he says.
It seems that a smellier future is likely to be a healthier one too.
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