Olfaction and essential tremor.

OBJECTIVE

To characterize the olfactory identification in 40 essential tremor (ET) patients, with the University of Pennsylvania 12 Smell Identification Test (UPSIT), to correlate UPSIT scores to clinical and epidemiological data and to compare it to 89 aged matched controls.

METHOD: Patients were assessed using ET Clinical Scale of Evaluation and UPSIT.

RESULTS

In patients with ET, the UPSIT medium score was 9.10, similar to the control group (9.11), which was also observed in all age groups. ET severity did not correlate to UPSIT scores.

CONCLUSION

This study demonstrated normality of olfactory identification on ET, qualifying UPSIT to be an important tool on tremor differential diagnosis of undetermined origin.