Preface

Abstract

Although often taken for granted, odors and tastes significantly impact our everyday lives, influencing our eating habits, nutrition, and safety. How many of us look forward to the aroma of brewing coffee and sizzling bacon in the morning and a delicious dinner accompanied by a fine wine in the evening? Throughout history, food has been at the center of our species' social gatherings, including the celebration of birthdays, national and religious holidays, and simple gatherings of friends and loved ones. The chemical senses are not only central to such occasions, but serve to protect us from environmental dangers. How many of us have averted a disaster by smelling something burning on the stove or from an electrical short or other untoward event in the home, workplace, or automobile? How many of us have, on occasion, experienced the smell of leaking natural gas, spoiled food, or an unclean environment? Perhaps it is no wonder why persons who present to the clinic with smell or taste loss are often anxious, depressed, or apprehensive. Unfortunately, the genesis of their emotional state often goes unappreciated by friends, relatives, and medical practitioners from whom they seek help. The contributions to this special volume of WJOHNS focus on clinical aspects of smell and taste that are commonly omitted from medical textbooks. It begins by exploring the vast array of means by which smell and taste can be clinically assessed, and includes a conceptual chapter on developing a unique olfactory test for tracking the development of brain alterations in head trauma patients. It then explores a novel in vivo animal model that shows the practicality of quantitatively assessing the olfactory fila using magnetic resonance imaging. Other articles examine chemosensory disorders due to rhinosinusitis, head trauma, autism, iatrogenic interventions (e.g., tonsillectomy), and medication usage. Included is an outstanding review focused on the exciting discovery that chemoreceptors that mediate taste sensations also serve roles outside the taste realm, including the upper airways where they aid in warding off bacteria and in maintaining a healthy nasal environment. The rarely researched area of olfactory loss in children is explored, as are the influences of surgical procedures, including endoscopic nasosinus surgery and tonsillectomy, on smell or taste function. Of practical interest to the practitioner are chapters on the impact of altered chemosensation on nutrition, taste-related side effects of medications, and how conditioned taste aversions that develop as a result of sickness from radiation or chemotherapy may be averted by strategic dietary planning. Obviously major aspects of chemosensation could not be covered in this brief volume, so the reader is referred elsewhere to the many reviews, books, and papers that have appeared over the course of the last decade or so for specific aspects of the anatomy and physiology of these remarkable senses. On behalf of all of the authors, we hope that this volume will prove of benefit to medical practitioners in their understanding, evaluation, and treatment of patients suffering from chemosensory dysfunction.