What Your Nose Says About How Well You're Aging
For years, Joy Milne observed something strange about her husband Les...
He smelled different.
Joy first noticed it when Les was 31 years old – an odd "yeast" smell that wouldn't go away even when he showered. The smell grew stronger over the following months.
As years passed, Joy also noticed changes in Les' personality and mood. He began to seem like a very different person from the man she'd married.
Then, 14 years after she first noticed the strange odor, Les was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.
The couple attended a Parkinson's support-group meeting together years later. As soon as they entered the room, Joy realized something... The other people with Parkinson's smelled just like Les.
This was a startling discovery. Could Joy's nose really detect Parkinson's?
Researchers decided to put Joy's nose to the test... They gave her 12 T-shirts, six of them that had been worn by Parkinson's patients and six that had been worn by folks without the disease. Joy was able to correctly identify all six Parkinson's patients. She even flagged a supposedly healthy person who was diagnosed with the disease several months later.
Her unusual ability helped scientists discover that Parkinson's is associated with a distinct chemical signature in our skin oil, or sebum. Basically, Joy's nose was able to pick up on a hidden signal of the disease.
And now researchers are finding the reverse might be true. That's because changes in how well your nose works could reveal a lot about your health...
Specifically, how well your own nose works could offer clues about how well the rest of your body is aging.
Take, for example, a study published last year in JAMA Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery... It involved 2,524 Swedish adults aged 60 to 99 who took a test that required them to identify 16 odors. Then researchers followed up with the participants after six and 12 years.
The team found that the worse a participant performed on the smell test, the greater their risk of dying in the years that followed. Now, this doesn't mean you'll die sooner if you have a poor sense of smell. Rather, researchers concluded that smell loss appears to be one marker of declining health...
We've known for years that a declining sense of smell can accompany neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. And researchers found that having a poorer sense of smell may also be a sign of having broader health problems. In this study, dementia, frailty, and malnutrition may partly explain why a poorer sense of smell was linked to a higher risk of death.
Another study from 2023 supports this idea. It involved 1,160 older adults who underwent a two-part test where they had to identify and detect several scents. As it turned out, participants who performed worse on either measure tended to be more frail.
Researchers are still trying to figure out exactly why olfactory issues (i.e., related to the sense of smell) and frailty may be connected. But a dysfunctional sense of smell could signal the root causes of unhealthy aging... like increased systemic inflammation, a declining ability to repair damage, or changes in your nervous system's adaptability.
As we get older, olfactory disorders become more common... About 13% of Americans in their 60s have one. That jumps to 25% for folks in their 70s... and 39% among folks aged 80 and older.
A "smell disorder" can mean several things... It might be a weakened or lost sense of smell, or even a faulty one that distorts odors or smells things that aren't there.
Losing your sense of smell can create other problems, too... For example, food might become less appealing. That could result in poor eating habits, weight loss, and malnutrition. And you also might have trouble using your nose to detect spoiled food... or even notice dangerous smells like smoke or gas.
How to Give Your Nose a Workout
Turns out, you can strengthen your nose. And researchers have been studying whether that can do more for your health than just improving your sense of smell...
A small, randomized trial in 2025 involved 53 older adults who had noticed changes in their memory or thinking. For 20 days, one group practiced memory exercises involving odors while another group performed visual-memory exercises.
As you'd expect, both groups got better at the type of task they practiced. But at the one-month follow-up, the odor-training group also improved on a visual-memory task compared with at baseline. And that was despite having spent the study period training their memory using odors instead of images.
But if you're just looking to take better care of your sense of smell, here are some ways to do it...
1. Give your nose a "baseline."
Start paying more attention to the familiar smells you encounter every day, like your morning coffee, the soap you use in the shower, the spices in your pantry, and more. You don't need to take a formal test – you're just establishing a baseline of sorts and getting familiar with what's normal for you. That way, you'll be more likely to notice if something changes. And if you do notice a sudden, significant, and/or persistent change in your olfactory ability, tell your doctor.
2. Exercise your nose.
Practice breathing deeply, noticing what you smell, and describing it aloud. Work your smell receptors by taking long whiffs of a pleasant aroma before describing the smell to someone else. After a while, you'll start to notice those smells more easily. You can even make it an event by grabbing some of your favorite essential oils, a good friend, and taking a "scent journey" in your living room.
Finally, you should always give your nose a "backup." If your sense of smell were to become less reliable, you'd need another line of defense for detecting dangers like smoke, gas leaks, and spoiled food. Make sure your smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors are working. And put dates on leftovers so you don't need to rely on the sniff test.
What We're Reading...
- Something different: It's the corgi "Olympics."
Here's to our health, wealth, and a great retirement,
Dr. David Eifrig and the Health & Wealth Bulletin Research Team
August 18, 2026