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Governments Senior Health Site Adds Smell and Taste
Information
Aug. 10, 2005 The latest additions to the health
Website maintained by the National Institutes of Health for senior
citizens are pages about smell and taste. Two out of three Americans
over age 80 and three of ten between 70 and 80 have problems with the
sense of smell. Problems with taste are less common but the sense of
taste does also decline with age.
Because smell and taste are closely linked in the
brain, many people mistakenly believe they have a problem with taste,
when they are really experiencing a problem with their sense of smell.
Problems with smell or taste may cause certain
foods to lose their appeal, causing a person to eat too much of the
fattier foods and gain weight or too little of the more healthful foods
and lose too much weight.
Because people frequently try to compensate for
diminished smell or taste by adding too much sugar or salt to make food
taste better, loss of these senses can cause problems for people with
heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and other illnesses that require
sticking to a specific diet. In addition, the sense of smell often
serves as a warning system, as in the case of a fire or gas leak, so
people with total or partial loss of smell are almost twice as likely to
have certain types of accidents as people who have normal smell.
Although the senses of smell and taste do decline
with age, anyone who experiences significant loss of smell or taste or a
sudden change in one of their senses should seek medical attention,
says James F. Battey Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the National
Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), which
developed the content for the taste and smell topics on the
NIHSeniorHealth Web site.
Loss of smell or taste can be indicative of an
underlying medical condition and should not be ignored. NIHSeniorHealth
provides a valuable resource of information on these important issues,
he added.
Now accurate, up-to-date information about the
important senses of smell and taste is available in a senior-friendly
format at
http://www.nihseniorhealth.gov.
Visitors to the site can learn about how these senses work, how smell
and taste decline with age or illness, and what older adults can do to
cope with the loss of these senses.
One of the fastest growing age groups using the
Internet, older Americans increasingly turn to the World Wide Web for
health information. A recent survey found 66 percent of wired seniors
surf for health and medical information when they go online.
NIHSeniorHealth, a joint effort of the National
Institute on Aging (NIA) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM), was
designed especially with seniors in mind. Both the NIA and NLM are part
of the National Institutes of Health. The site is based on the latest
research on cognition and aging.
It features short, easy-to-read segments of
information that can be accessed in a variety of formats, including
various large-print type sizes, open-captioned videos, and an audio
version. Additional topics coming to the site include stroke,
osteoporosis, and heart disease. The site links to MedlinePlus, NLMs
premier, more detailed site for consumer health information.
The NIA leads the federal effort supporting and
conducting research on aging and the health and well-being of older
people. The NLM, the worlds largest library of the health sciences,
creates and sponsors Web-based health information resources for the
public and professionals.
The NIDCD supports and conducts biomedical and
behavioral research in the normal and disordered processes of hearing,
balance, smell, taste, voice, speech, and language, seeking to help
those who suffer from communication disorders. All three are components
of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, part of the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) The
Nation's Medical Research Agency is comprised of 27 Institutes and
Centers and is a component of the U. S. Department of Health and Human
Services. It is the primary Federal agency for conducting and supporting
basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and investigates
the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For
more information about NIH and its programs, visit
http://www.nih.gov.
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