By David Arndt
A long-term study spanning five years and including more than 3,000 nationally-representative older US adults has found that a natural decline of the five classical senses (vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch) can predict a number of poor health outcomes, including greater risk of death.
The study began with an assessment of how sensory dysfunction, or “global sensory impairment,” a term coined by the researchers, affected physical and cognitive abilities in adults aged 57-85. The research team, led by Jayant Pinto, MD, professor of surgery at the University of Chicago, found that adults with worse global sensory impairment moved slower and had greater difficulty performing daily activities.
Five years later, the same people had more global sensory impairment. They moved even slower, were less active, and had more physical and cognitive disabilities. Compared to those with less sensory impairment, they even had a higher risk of dying.
“This is the first study to show that decreased sensory function of all five senses can be a significant predictor of major health outcomes,” said Martha McClintock, PhD, the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago and a lead contributor to the study.
The paper, “Global Sensory Impairment Predicts Morbidity and Mortality in Older US Adults,” published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, follows a related 2014 study by the same group that focused on loss of smell as a predictor of death. The new study, however, found “no one specific sense that is primarily responsible for this phenomenon,” said David Kern, PhD, coauthor of the paper and expert in sensation and perception research. “Olfaction (smell) is certainly a big predictor, but if you take smell out of the equation, the other four senses still stand as a significant predictor of health outcomes.”