<h1>October - Come she will</h1>

Summer is over and the stale smell of October is in air. Or, maybe it isn't....It is the smell of dead leaves, rain, and a paucity of newness.

I say there "maybe" a stale smell in the air, because I wouldn't know. See my earlier rants on the subject. You might remember I have lost practically all of my sense of smell. It deserted me about 10 years ago when I realized that I could not smell the odor of raw sewage in the basement of my house (that tale can be found in an ealier entry). My ability to smell drained away gradually until now, it has to be a very pungent smell for me to detect it.

Sometimes I miss that sense, you know, like the smell of turkey cooking at Christmas; other times, I find it convenient, for example when my baby grandson fills his diapers (oddly, even though I can't smell his poop, I gag at the thought of changing him.)

From the MJ Fox Foundation"SMELL LOSS"

An often overlooked symptom

While most people with a reduced sense of smell will not develop Parkinson's, the majority of Parkinson's disease patients do have reduced sense of smell. Loss of sense of smell is often overlooked by diagnosing physicians as an early sign of PD. There are of course many other reasons a person may be experiencing a loss in sense of smell.

If you believe that you may have trouble with smell, consult your doctor.

Why am I losing my sense of smell?

Little is confirmed about what causes the early, pre-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s, such as hyposmia, this loss of smell. But one prevalent theory in Parkinson's research about disease progression has to do with the protein alpha-synuclein, whose clumping is found in all people with the disease.

This theory, based on the research of Heiko Braak, MD suggests that the disease may start not in the substantia nigra (the region of the brain where loss of nerve cells leads to the dopamine deficit experienced by people with PD) but in the gastrointestinal system and the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that controls sense of smell. Researchers have hypothesized that the alpha-synuclein clumps found in all people with Parkinson's may form in these parts of the body first, before migrating to other parts of the brain. Should this turn out to be true, and if researchers can find the clumps and break them up before they reach the brain, it may become possible to treat Parkinson's before major neurological damage occurs.

“Candy is full of taste. But so is shit, because taste is full of smell.”( Jarod Kintz, This Book Has No Title