Dementia Takes Away Meaning of Flavor

Author: Elsevier
Published: 2010/05/10
Category Topic: Dementia - Academic Publications

Page Content: Synopsis - Introduction - Main

Synopsis: Processing of flavor information in patients with semantic dementia.

Introduction

Main Content

Yet just this aspect of everyday life is vulnerable in certain degenerative dementias, with patients developing abnormal eating behaviors including changes in food preferences, faddism and pathological sweet tooth. New research has revealed evidence that these behaviors are linked to a loss of meaning for flavors, as reported in the June 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex (www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex).

Cortex is an international journal devoted to the study of cognition and of the relationship between the nervous system and mental processes, particularly as these are reflected in the behavior of patients with acquired brain lesions, normal volunteers, children with typical and atypical development, and in the activation of brain regions and systems as recorded by functional neuroimaging techniques. It was founded in 1964 by Ennio De Renzi. The Editor in-chief of Cortex is Sergio Della Sala, Professor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh. Fax: 0131 6513230, e-mail: cortex@ed.ac.uk. Cortex is available online at www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00109452

Dr Katherine Piwnica-Worms from Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, together with Dr Jason Warren and colleagues from University College London, investigated the processing of flavor information in patients with semantic dementia, a degenerative disease affecting the temporal lobes of the brain. Patients with this condition suffer a profound loss of the meaning of words and, ultimately, of things in the world at large; in addition, many develop a preference for unusual foods or food combinations.

The researchers tested patients' flavor processing using jelly beans: a convenient and widely available stimulus covering a broad spectrum of flavors. The abilities of patients to discriminate and identify flavor combinations according to their appropriateness and pleasantness were compared with healthy people of the same age and cultural background. Patients were able to discriminate different flavors normally and to indicate whether they found certain combinations pleasant or not, but they had difficulty identifying individual flavors or assessing the appropriateness of particular flavor combinations (for example, vanilla and pickle).

These findings provide the first evidence that the meaning of flavors, like other things in the world, becomes affected in semantic dementia: this is a truly 'pan-modal' deficiency of knowledge. The research gives clues to the brain basis for the abnormal eating behaviors and the altered valuation of foods shown by many patients with dementia. More broadly, the results offer a perspective on how the brain organizes and evaluates those commonplace flavors that enrich our daily lives.

"Flavor processing in semantic dementia" by Katherine E. Piwnica-Worms, Rohani Omar, Julia C. Hailstone, and Jason D. Warren, and appears in Cortex, Volume 46, Issue 6 (June 2010), published by Elsevier in Italy.

Elsevier is a world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including the Lancet (www.thelancet.com) and Cell (www.cell.com), and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com), Scopus (www.scopus.com), Reaxys (www.reaxys.com), MD Consult (www.mdconsult.com) and Nursing Consult (www.nursingconsult.com), which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite (www.scival.com) and MEDai's Pinpoint Review (www.medai.com), which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.