A person with autism may be diagnosed with a smell test, a study suggests.
Normal individuals respond to pleasant smell by taking a deep breath, while for bad odor, they are more likely to limit their breathing. Researchers, however, discovered that autistic children do not react to any at all. In fact, those with autism show different sniffing patterns than normal children.
"We can identify autism and its severity with meaningful accuracy within less than 10 minutes using a test that is completely non-verbal and entails no task to follow," Noam Sobel, who works for Weizmann Institute of Science, and a principal researcher of the study.
Liron Rozenkrantz, a neuroscientist and another researcher, quipped that autistic children are totally devoid of making natural adjustment.
The result of their research is published in the latest issue of Current Biology.
The results involved 18 children who were believed to have autism and another set of 18 normal children. They were asked to sniff unpleasant odors and pleasant smells. They responses were then recorded. The results revealed that there was actually a significant difference on the sniff responses between those with autism and who were normal.
The results of the study was praised by specialists because they have "hit upon a novel way of testing differences between children with autism and those without that indeed seems to suggest marked differences in how autistic children process odors," according to Dr. Glen Elliott, chief psychiatrist and medical director of Children's Health Council in Palo Alto, California.
Elliott also find it intriguing that while autistic children "are hypersensitive to touch, sound, taste and visual stimuli," they are, however, non-responsive to odor.
The researchers, meanwhile, hope that their study would be used as one way of diagnosing children with autism.
"This is a nonverbal measure, and it only requires breathing," Rozenkrantz said.
