Mild traumatic brain injury: evaluation of olfactory dysfunction and clinical–neurological characteristics

ABSTRACT

Objective: To evaluate olfactory function and clinical–neurological characteristics in a group of patients with mild head trauma.

Methods: A total of 352 patients with MTBI underwent olfactory function evaluation. The site of head trauma, loss of consciousness <20 min, memory loss, subjective presence or absence of olfaction and other clinical, neurological and radiological aspects were evaluated and compared with the olfactory dysfunction.

Results: A total of 33.5% patients enrolled in the study had an olfactory dysfunction. Eighty-seven percent of the patients had a diagnosis of anosmia whereas 13% had a diagnosis of hyposmia. Statistical analysis did not show a correlation between radiologically detected head lesions and different types of olfactory dysfunction (p > 0.05). Besides, no difference between head lesion site and different olfactory dysfunction was reported (p = 0.5). Regarding olfactory sub-tests a low detection threshold was present in these patients.

Conclusion: The possibility of olfactory dysfunction should be considered in any case of MTBI appears differently than expected, a minor head injury causes anosmia much more frequently than hyposmia.

KEYWORDS:

• Head trauma
• olfactory dysfunction
• Glasgow coma scale
• Sniffin’ Sticks

Declaration of interest

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

The authors declared no grant or other source of funding.