New research suggests that a "sniff test" could determine whether someone has autism.
People without the disorder tend to spend longer amount of time inhaling "the delightful aroma of a bouquet of roses than the foul stench of rotting fish," BBC News reported. Autistic children go right on sniffing in the same way, no matter how pleasant or awful the scent.
"The difference in sniffing pattern between the typically developing children and children with autism was simply overwhelming," Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel said in a statement.
For the study, researcher presented 18 children with autism spectrum disorder and 18 normally developing children with pleasant and unpleasant odors and measured their sniff response, The Telegraph reported. While typical children adjusted their sniffing within 305 milliseconds of smelling an odor, the researchers report, children on the autism spectrum showed no such response.
That difference in sniff response between the two groups of kids was enough to correctly classify them as children with or without a diagnosis of ASD 81 percent of the time. Moreover, the researchers report that increasingly aberrant sniffing was associated with increasingly severe autism symptoms, based on social but not motor impairments.
"We can identify autism and its severity with meaningful accuracy within less than 10 minutes using a test that is completely non-verbal and entails no task to follow," Sobel said. "This raises the hope that these findings could form the base for development of a diagnostic tool that can be applied very early on, such as in toddlers only a few months old. Such early diagnosis would allow for more effective intervention."
The researchers now plan to test whether the sniff-response pattern they've observed is specific to autism or whether it might show up also in people with other neurodevelopmental conditions.
The findings are detailed in the journal Current Biology.
