[Home accidents associated with anosmia]

To assess the risk of home accidents related to severe hyposmia.

A questionnaire, completed by 57 hyposmic patients and 49 control subjects with a normal sense of smell, asked about four specific types of olfactory-related home accidents: undetected fires, undetected gas leaks, consumption of spoiled food, and incidents of food burning. Level of olfactory function was determined by olfactory testing (Biolfa).

Olfactory testing revealed that 60% of the patients were anosmic and 40% had severe hyposmia. They reported cooking-related accidents most often (63%), followed by eating spoiled food (51%), inability to detect a gas leak (47%) and inability to smell a fire (26%). All these accidents were significantly more frequent than in the control population (p<10(-4)).

This paper, the first in the European literature and the second in the international literature, shows that patients with severely impaired olfaction are more likely to experience related accidents than those with normal olfactory function.