Adapting the Sniffin' Sticks to diagnose Parkinson's disease in Sri Lanka

Tests of odor identification might help differentiate Parkinson's disease (PD) from other causes of tremor, but they are culture and language specific and are not currently available for the population of Sri Lanka. We created a Sinhala adaptation of the 16-item identification test from Sniffin' Sticks (SS-16) and applied it to 89 nondemented Sri Lankan PD patients and 100 controls. Twelve of the SS-16 items were correctly identified by at least 50% of the control subjects and were included in a battery, which we called as Colombo SS-12. We used the diagnosis (PD or control) as outcome variable for a logistic regression using age, gender, smoking status and the SS-12 as covariates, and found only the last two were significant covariates. The Colombo SS-12 specificity was 93.0% with a sensitivity of 91.0%, indicating it could be a helpful tool in the diagnosis of PD in Sri Lanka.