Flavor is literally the spice of life and for many people life without the pleasures of the table would be unthinkable.
Yet just this aspect of everyday life is vulnerable in certain degenerative dementias, with patients developing abnormal eating behaviours including changes in food preferences, faddism and pathological sweet tooth. New research has revealed evidence that these behaviours are linked to a loss of meaning for flavours, as reported in the June 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex.
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The researchers tested patients' flavour processing using jelly beans: a convenient and widely available stimulus covering a broad spectrum of flavours. The abilities of patients to discriminate and identify flavours and to assess flavour 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 flavours normally and to indicate whether they found certain combinations pleasant or not, but they had difficulty identifying individual flavours or assessing the appropriateness of particular flavour combinations (for example, vanilla and pickle).
These findings provide the first evidence that the meaning of flavours, 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 behaviours and the altered valuation of foods shown by many patients with dementia. More broadly, the results offer a perspective on how the brain organises and evaluates those commonplace flavours that enrich our daily lives.
The article is "Flavour 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.
About 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 behaviour 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.
About Elsevier
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.
The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).
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