Thomas Hummel

Technische Universität Dresden | TUD · Faculty of Medicine Carl Gustav Carus

Background: The focus on health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in medical research is becoming more and more intensive, with attention being paid to the patient's subjective feelings and assessment of one's health status. Smell disorders can significantly impact human life. The Questionnaire of Olfactory Disorders (QOD) is a self-monitoring quest...

Although chemical signaling is an essential mode of communication in most vertebrates, it has long been viewed as having negligible effects in humans. However, a growing body of evidence shows that the sense of smell affects human behavior in social contexts ranging from affiliation and parenting to disease avoidance and social threat. This article...

Objectives: Odorous stimulation helps to maintain or to improve olfactory function. In contrast, odor deprivation has been suggested to facilitate olfactory impairment. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of odor deprivation in people working in an odorless environment. Methods: Fifty people working in an odorless environment fo...

This international study aimed to investigate cross‐modal associations between parosmic sensations and visual information, as well as explore potential cross‐cultural differences; 393 parosmia patients from Argentina, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines participated. The patients were provided with a 63‐color chart encompassing diverse hues and a 2...

Background: Desensitization in response to repetitive odorous stimulations is a common and well-investigated process, but it has been a matter of discussion in which way this process relates to odor valence. Our goal was to investigate changes of intensity and pleasantness induced by desensitization in odors in relation to their valence and concent...

Introduction: The structures of the skull and the brain are related to each other. Prior work in individuals with isolated congenital anosmia (ICA) showed that these individuals were characterized by olfactory bulb (OB) defects. The aim of this study was to compare the morphological pattern of the anterior skull base surrounding the OB between ind...

Objective Parosmia is a qualitative olfactory dysfunction presenting as “distorted odor perception” in presence of an odor source. Aim of this study was to use resting state functional connectivity to gain more information on the alteration of olfactory processing at the level of the central nervous system level. Methods A cross sectional study wa...

PurposeThe aim of this prospective study was to examine the characteristics of a clinical test for the assessment of nasal trigeminal sensitivity to mechanical stimuli and its association with the perception of nasal patency.Methods Thirty-two normosmic healthy subjects participated (17 women and 15 men; age = 26 ± 3 years). Precisely defined air p...

Although hundreds of thousands of people seek medical help every year because of smell and taste disorders, the burden on patients is often underestimated by health care professionals. Numerous studies have demonstrated the impact of disorders of the chemical senses on quality of life. In clinical practice, the Questionnaire of Olfactory Disorders...

PURPOSE: The study aimed to analyze the impact of driver mutations and image characteristics of olfactory groove meningioma (OGM) on olfactory function. METHODS: Olfactory function was assessed in 22 patients with OGM using odor threshold, odor discrimination, odor identification, and a global olfactory score. Targeted sequencing was performed to d...

Background: Cumulative animal studies have suggested that olfaction can be regulated by circadian clock. However, human studies on the topic are relatively limited. The present study thus aimed to investigate diurnal variation in olfaction in healthy adults while examining potential modulating factors. Methods: We conducted four rounds of testin...

In healthy humans, taste sensitivity varies widely, influencing food selection and nutritional status. Chemosensory loss has been associated with numerous pathological disorders and pharmacological interventions. Reliable psychophysical methods are crucial for analyzing the taste function during routine clinical assessment. However, in the daily cl...

Background: Since publication of the original Position Paper on Olfactory Dysfunction in 2017 (PPOD-17), the personal and societal burden of olfactory disorders has come sharply into focus through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinicians, scientists and the public are now more aware of the importance of olfaction, and the impact of its dysfunc...

Background: Since publication of the original Position Paper on Olfactory Dysfunction in 2017 (PPOD-17), the personal and societal burden of olfactory disorders has come sharply into focus through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. Clinicians, scientists and the public are now more aware of the importance of olfaction, and the impact of its dysfun...

Intranasal insulin (IN) administration is a promising way to deliver the peptide to the central nervous system (CNS), bypassing the blood-brain-barrier and gastrointestinal absorption inhibition. IN receptors are localized in the olfactory mucosa and the brain, mainly in the olfactory bulb, hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, cerebral cortex, and...

The sense of smell is essential in daily life. Children with olfactory dysfunction face a series of problems, so assessing olfactory function during early‐life period is very important. The Universal Sniff (U‐Sniff) test is a widely used measurement of odor identification ability in children and adolescents, although there is a lack of normative da...

Purpose: To evaluate olfaction in dogs with sudden acquired retinal degeneration syndrome (SARDS) compared with sighted dogs and blind dogs without SARDS as control groups. Animals studied: Forty client-owned dogs. Procedure: Olfactory threshold testing was performed on three groups: SARDS, sighted, and blind/non-SARDS using eugenol as the tes...

Although validated and reliable psychophysical tests of olfactory function are available, an easy-to-use and feasible test has yet to be developed. This study aimed to design a digital odour identification test, evaluate its validity, establish a normative curve, and explore the impact of demographic factors. The odour identification test was prese...

Introduction: Chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) affects 5-12% of the general population with significant effects on quality of life. Chronic inflammation also seems to affect intranasal trigeminal sensitivity. Areas covered: A systematic literature search was done in Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed in February 2023. The review addressed intranasal t...

In healthy humans, taste sensitivity varies widely, influencing food selection and nutritional status. Chemosensory reductions have been associated with numerous pathological disorders or pharmacological interventions. Reliable psychophysical methods are crucial resources to analyze the taste function during routine clinical assessment. However, in...

People often confuse smell loss with taste loss, so it is unclear how much gustatory function is reduced in patients self-reporting taste loss. Our pre-registered cross-sectional study design included an online survey in 12 languages with instructions for self-administering chemosensory tests with ten household items. Between June 2020 and March 20...

This cross-sectional study aimed to investigate self-rated olfactory dysfunction in relation to measured olfactory function after partial or complete subjective recovery in individuals with a history of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection. A total of 186 individuals (aged 5–62 years) with a history of COVID-19 infection were included. Vis...

Depression is associated with reduced olfactory function. This relationship is assumed to be based on either a reduced olfactory bulb volume or diminished functioning of higher cortical areas. As previous results are controversial, we aimed to re-evaluate central olfactory processing in depression. We recorded the BOLD signal of 21 patients with Ma...

To the Editor, We read the meta-analysis on gustatory dysfunction in COVID-19 by Hannum et al. with great interest (Hannum et al. 2022). The authors are the first to systematically compare the prevalence of gustatory dysfunction in regard to its assessment: psychophysical taste tests vs. patients’ subjective self-reports. Interestingly, they found...

Objective To compare retronasal and orthonasal perception in parosmic COVID-19 patients, in order to determine whether COVID-19 has a differential effect on these functions. Methods Using the Sniffin Sticks test battery orthonasal function was examined for odor threshold, discrimination and identification. Retronasal function was assessed using 20...

Background: Pronounced chemosensory adaptation affects many patients with olfactory loss. The study aimed to investigate adaptation to olfactory and trigeminal nasal stimuli in patients with olfactory loss in comparison to controls using electrophysiological measures. Methodology: Thirty-four patients with olfactory loss (mean age ± SD = 59 ± 16...

Research has demonstrated links between sociodemographic background and educational achievements in vocational education and training. Student achievements may be additionally impacted by individual characteristics specifically relevant to the domain of the professional training. In the context of professional culinary education, student achievemen...

Quantitative real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) is the gold-standard method for analyzing modifications in gene expression in cells and tissues. However, large quantities of high-quality RNA samples are needed for analyzing the expression of multiple genes from one human tissue sample. Here, we provide an optimized...

Purpose Patients sometimes report phosphene and phantosmia during radiation therapy (RT). However, the detail features and related factors are not well understood. Our prospective study aimed to investigate the characteristics of phantosmias and phosphenes, to identify factors that influence the occurrence, intensity and hedonic (pleasantness/unple...

Environmental context reinstatement has a particular value for recall of information in forensic interviews. Since odors are valuable memory cues and can act as memory triggers, in our preliminary study we explored whether odor exposure can help people recall details of a crime scene. The study comprised 58 women and 15 men aged 22-35 who immersed...

Statement of problem: Evaluating the effectiveness of the management of Olfactory Dysfunction (OD) has been limited by a paucity of high-quality randomised and/or controlled trials. A major barrier is heterogeneity of outcomes in such studies. Core outcome sets (COS) -standardized sets of outcomes that should be measured/reported as determined by...

Purpose In a previous neuroimaging study, patients with taste loss showed stronger activations in gustatory cortices compared to people with normal taste function during taste stimulations. The aim of the current study was to examine whether there are changes in central-nervous functional connectivity in patients with taste loss. Methods We select...

Background Accumulating data emphasizes the importance of olfaction in migraine pathophysiology. However, there are only a few studies evaluating how the migraine brain processes olfactory stimulation, and virtually no studies comparing patients with and without aura in this context. Methods This cross-sectional study recorded event-related potent...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) in humans can result in olfactory, cognitive, and affective changes. Surprisingly, research on the consequences of TBI often did not control for olfactory function in the investigated groups. Consequently, the affective or cognitive differences might be misleading as related rather to different olfactory performance tha...

The gustatory, olfactory, and trigeminal systems are anatomically separated. However, they interact cognitively to give rise to oral perception, which can significantly affect health and quality of life. We built a Supervised Learning (SL) regression model that, exploiting subjects’ features, was capable of automatically analyzing with high precisi...

Purpose To determine the relationship of chemosensory screening and nasal airflow tests among the same set of participants, and to determine other factors that are related to the outcomes of these tests. Methods Participants had no chemosensory complaints. Structured medical history was taken. Participants underwent 5 screening tests: q-sticks (or...

Zusammenfasssung Der Geruchssinn ist wichtig. Das wurde insbesondere v. a. Patient:innen mit infektbedingtem Riechverlust während der SARS-CoV2 Pandemie bewusst. Wir reagieren z. B. auf Körpergerüche unserer Mitmenschen – die Nase bestimmt/wen wir „riechen können“. Der Geruchssinn warnt uns vor Gefahren, die Wahrnehmung von Düften und die Wahrnehmu...

Background: Definitions are essential for effective communication and discourse, particularly in science. They allow the shared understanding of a thought or idea, generalization of knowledge, and comparison across scientific investigation. The current terms describing olfactory dysfunction are vague and overlapping. Summary: As a group of clini...

Introduction We previously demonstrated functionally significant structural plasticity within the central olfactory networks, in association with improved olfaction after surgical treatment of chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS). In order to confirm and expand on these findings, the primary aim of this study was to determine whether these same regions und...

Odor deprivation leads to anatomical and neurochemical changes in the olfactory system, but its effect on human olfaction has not been systematically explored. The present randomized, controlled study aimed to investigate whether odor deprivation by different methods can affect olfactory function in humans. In the present study, sixty-one healthy p...

The olfactory bulbs (OBs) play a key role in olfactory processing; their volume is important for diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of patients with olfactory loss. Until now, measurements of OB volumes have been limited to quantification of manually segmented OBs, which is a cumbersome task and makes evaluation of OB volumes in large scale clinica...

Introduction: Current scientific developments seem to allow for an "olfactory implant" in analogy to cochlear implants. However, the position and surgical approaches for electrical stimulation of the olfactory system are unclear. Methods: In a human anatomic cadaver study, we investigated different endoscopic approaches to electrically stimulate...

Much is known about the effect of odors on mood, cognition and behavior, but little is known about the relationship between odors and well-being. We investigated the neural processing of odors with different degrees of association with well-being (WB) through two large independent datasets. The study encompassed pre-testing and fMRI. During pre-tes...

Oxidoreductases are major enzymes of xenobiotic metabolism. Consequently, they are essential in the chemoprotection of the human body. Many xenobiotic metabolism enzymes have been shown to be involved in chemosensory tissue protection. Among them, some were additionally shown to be involved in chemosensory perception, acting in signal termination a...

Background Random walks describe stochastic processes that result from a sequence of indeterminate changes in a random variable that are not correlated with past changes. This report describes a random walk component of a clinical sensory test of olfactory performance. The formal description of the stochastic process during the clinical test allows...

Background- Nasal cycle (NC) is a rhythmic change of lateralized nasal airflow mediated by the autonomous nervous system. Previous studies reported the dependence of NC dominance on handedness and hemispheric cerebral activity. Objective- We aimed to investigate firstly, the possible lateralized effect of NC dominance on olfactory bulb volume: the...

Parosmia is an olfactory disorder that involves distortions of specific odors that may co-occur with anosmia, loss of smell of other odors. Little is known about which odors frequently trigger parosmia, and measures of parosmia severity are lacking. Here, we present an approach to understand and diagnose parosmia that is based on semantic propertie...

Introduction The objective of this study was to determine whether postoperative additive systemic steroid administration in chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps (CRSwNP) impacted selected endoscopic, subjective and objective outcome measures. Methods This was a prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, noninferiority multicent...

Background: Disorders of the sense of smell have received greater attention because of the frequency with which they occur as a symptom of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Olfactory dysfunction can lead to profound reduction in quality of life and may arise from many different causes. Methods: A selective literature review was conducted with consideration...

Objective: The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between olfactory sulcus (OS) depth and olfactory function considering age and gender and to provide normative data on OS depth in a population with normal olfactory function. Materials and methods: OS depth was obtained using T1 magnetic resonance imaging scans. Participants (me...

Taste and oral somatosensation are intimately related to each other from peripheral receptors to the central nervous system. Oral astringent sensation is thought to contain both gustatory and somatosensory components. In the present study, we compared the cerebral response to an astringent stimulus (tannin), with the response to one typical taste s...

Background The aim of this study was to psychophysically evaluate the prevalence of smell and taste dysfunction 2 years after mildly symptomatic severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus‐2 (SARS‐CoV‐2) infection compared to that observed at 1‐year follow‐up and while considering the background of chemosensory dysfunction in the no‐coronavirus d...

Bacterial composition is uniform in the sinuses of postviral olfactory dysfunction patients. Significant reduction of genus Corynebacterium in PVOD patients compared to controls.

Background Odor memory is an important field of clinical research for its distinctive characteristics, which differ from those of other sensory systems. To date, several tests have been implemented for the assessment of odor memory. Despite a range of studies demonstrating the importance of verbal mediation in odor memory, few have distinguished od...

Background A precise and reliable test of the olfactory function is indispensable for the diagnosis of the olfactory disorder (OD). Despite of this, in a clinical context, often there is no place in daily routine for time-consuming procedures. This study aimed to examine if the assessment of olfactory function using the “Sniffin’ Sticks” is suitabl...

Previous studies have reported increased sensitivity to malodor after acute stress in humans. However, it is unclear whether stress-related "hypersensitivity" to odors depends on odor pleasantness. Forty participants (mean age 19.13 ± 1.14 years, 21 men and 19 women) completed a stress (Trier Social Stress Test, TSST) and a control session in rando...

Background Loss of olfactory function appears to be a typical COVID-19 symptom, at least in early variants of SARS-CoV2. The time that has elapsed since the emergence of COVID-19 now allows us to assess the long-term prognosis of its olfactory impact. Methods Participants (n = 722 of whom n = 464 reported having had COVID-19 dating back with a mod...