ArticleBMC neuroscience2012
An olfactory demography of a diverse metropolitan population.
Article in BMC neuroscience, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 90 citations in OpenAlex.
- Visually induced motion sickness can be alleviated by pleasant odors.Experimental brain research · 2015Trial
- Odor Thresholds in Flavor Science: A Data-Driven Review From Mechanisms to Applications.Comprehensive reviews in food science and food safety · 2026Review
- The Unmet Need of Olfactory Testing in Inflammatory Disorders of the Upper Airways-An EAACI Position Paper.Allergy · 2026Review
- Formulation considerations in enhancing olfactory mucosal deposition for nose-to-brain drug delivery.Drug delivery and translational research · 2026Review
- Modelling the odor profile of fungal Solid-State Fermentation.NPJ science of food · 2026Article
- Machine learning for smell: ordinal odor strength prediction of molecular perfumery components.RSC advances · 2026Article
- Hierarchies of smell: structuring the molecular odor space using semantic taxonomies and machine learning.Chemical senses · 2026Article
- Decoding odor responses: universal patterns and individual signatures in psychophysiology using nonlinear models.Chemical senses · 2026Article
- Human olfactory sensitivity varies across geographical locations.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- What makes a scent trigger a memory? A cognitive decomposition of odor-evoked retrieval.iScience · 2026Article
- Demographic and geographical determinants of human olfactory perception of 909 individuals inhabiting 16 regions.iScience · 2025Article
- Convergent reduction of olfactory genes and olfactory bulb size in mammalian species at altitude.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Orthonasal and retronasal olfactory function in patients with chronic rhinosinusitis without nasal polyps undergoing endoscopic sinonasal surgery.International forum of allergy & rhinology · 2025Article
- Odour and indoor air quality hazards in railway cars: an Australian mixed methods case study.Journal of environmental health science & engineering · 2024Article
- Pyrfume: A window to the world's olfactory data.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Nature and human well-being: The olfactory pathway.Science advances · 2024Review
- A principal odor map unifies diverse tasks in olfactory perception.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Androstadienone sensitivity is associated with attention to emotions, social interactions, and sexual behavior in older U.S. adults.PloS one · 2023Article
- Article
- Olfactory and Gustatory Supra-Threshold Sensitivities Are Linked toFoods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundHuman perception of the odour environment is highly variable. People vary both in their general olfactory acuity as well as in if and how they perceive specific odours. In recent years, it has been shown that genetic differences contribute to variability in both general olfactory acuity and the perception of specific odours. Odour perception also depends on other factors such as age and gender. Here we investigate the influence of these factors on both general olfactory acuity and on the perception of 66 structurally and perceptually different odours in a diverse subject population.
resultsWe carried out a large human olfactory psychophysics study of 391 adult subjects in metropolitan New York City, an ethnically and culturally diverse North American metropolis. 210 of the subjects were women and the median age was 34.6 years (range 19-75). We recorded ~2,300 data points per subject to obtain a comprehensive perceptual phenotype, comprising multiple perceptual measures of 66 diverse odours. We show that general olfactory acuity correlates with gender, age, race, smoking habits, and body type. Young, female, non-smoking subjects had the highest average olfactory acuity. Deviations from normal body type in either direction were associated with decreased olfactory acuity. Beyond these factors we also show that, surprisingly, there are many odour-specific influences of race, age, and gender on olfactory perception. We show over 100 instances in which the intensity or pleasantness perception of an odour is significantly different between two demographic groups.
conclusionsThese data provide a comprehensive snapshot of the olfactory sense of a diverse population. Olfactory acuity in the population is most strongly influenced by age, followed by gender. We also show a large number of diverse correlations between demographic factors and the perception of individual odours that may reflect genetic differences as well as different prior experiences with these odours between demographic groups.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.