I haven't been able to smell for a long time. While it could be to my advantage, but it is and can be a problem. Food doesn't taste the same. Once in a great while, I smell something that has an odor, but I can not tell what it is. At times I crave some food but when I get it, it does not taste as good as I remember it. I wrote in the past about my iron burning and my service dog warned me, since the burning started in the inside of the iron, before the flames and smoke showed. God was watching over me that day.
This is just a part of my Parkinson's disease. It is something that I have adjusted to. Not everyone with Parkinson's disease has the problem of not being able to smell.
Why am I losing my sense of smell?
Little is confirmed about what causes the early, pre-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s, such as hyposmia, this loss of smell. But one prevalent theory in Parkinson's research about disease progression has to do with the protein alpha-synuclein, whose clumping is found in all people with the disease.
This theory, based on the research of Heiko Braak, MD suggests that the disease may start not in the substantia nigra (the region of the brain where loss of nerve cells leads to the dopamine deficit experienced by people with PD) but in the gastrointestinal system and the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that controls sense of smell. Researchers have hypothesized that the alpha-synuclein clumps found in all people with Parkinson's may form in these parts of the body first, before migrating to other parts of the brain. Should this turn out to be true, and if researchers can find the clumps and break them up before they reach the brain, it may become possible to treat Parkinson's before major neurological damage occurs.
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