Patterns: The telltale scent of old people
Did Grandma's house smell funny? Chances are it did, and researchers may have discovered why: old people have a different body odour from younger people, and young people are good at detecting it.
Researchers had 41 healthy people in three age groups — young (ages 20 to 30), middle-aged (45 to 55) and old (75 to 95) — put absorbent pads in their armpits for five nights to collect odours. Then the scientists asked people in their 20s to smell the pads.
The results appeared online recently in the journal PLoS One.
The smellers were asked to distinguish old from young in various ways — by making a choice between two pads, by sorting pads into age groups, and by guessing the age as the pads were presented randomly. They were also asked to rate the pleasantness and intensity of the odours.
Analysis showed that smellers were able to discriminate between age groups and place the old-age pads together at rates significantly greater than chance. For most of the young people, the smell of old people was not particularly intense or unpleasant.
"We definitely have an old people odour," said the senior author, Johan N Lundstrom, an assistant professor at the Monell Center in Philadelphia and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The smell seems to be unoffensive, he added, when sniffed in the absence of any particular person.
Did Grandma's house smell funny? Chances are it did, and researchers may have discovered why: old people have a different body odour from younger people, and young people are good at detecting it.
Researchers had 41 healthy people in three age groups — young (ages 20 to 30), middle-aged (45 to 55) and old (75 to 95) — put absorbent pads in their armpits for five nights to collect odours. Then the scientists asked people in their 20s to smell the pads.
The results appeared online recently in the journal PLoS One.
The smellers were asked to distinguish old from young in various ways — by making a choice between two pads, by sorting pads into age groups, and by guessing the age as the pads were presented randomly. They were also asked to rate the pleasantness and intensity of the odours.
Analysis showed that smellers were able to discriminate between age groups and place the old-age pads together at rates significantly greater than chance. For most of the young people, the smell of old people was not particularly intense or unpleasant.
"We definitely have an old people odour," said the senior author, Johan N Lundstrom, an assistant professor at the Monell Center in Philadelphia and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The smell seems to be unoffensive, he added, when sniffed in the absence of any particular person.