Abstract

There are many clinical implications associated with anosmia, the loss of the sense of smell. It is a known precursor for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and it is a known symptom of COVID-19. Contrarily, there is lots of anecdotal evidence of heightened sense of smell during pregnancy. There are many different dimensions of smell, and therefore multiple ways for it to be measured. The focus of this experiment is on odor discrimination and threshold testing; discrimination involves one’s ability to distinguish between different odors, and threshold testing revolves around which level of concentration or “intensity” a smell can it be detected. This experiment involves collecting odor threshold and discrimination data on college students to serve as a baseline to compare to pregnant women’s ability to smell, in order to validate or falsify their anecdotal claims of experiencing a heightened olfactory ability. Participants were tested in three tasks for odor discrimination, but only two types (same-different task; triangle tasks). An ANOVA test was run and revealed that there was no significant difference in performance among the tasks (p = 0.13). This test revealed that the scores for participants of our odor discrimination tasks (triangle task and same-different task) did not differ. Previous data from pregnant women tested on an UPSIT scale was compared with the acquired data, and results revealed that there was no significant difference in odor threshold detection or odor discrimination ability between pregnant women and non-pregnant male and female college students.