The Feasibility of Gelatin-Based Retronasal Stimuli to Assess Olfactory Perception

Links between some psychological disorders and olfactory deficitsare well documented, and screening tests have been developed to exploit theseassociations. Odors can take one of two routes to the olfactory receptors in the nasalepithelium, the orthonasal or retronasal route. This article discusses the potential useof the retronasal route to assess olfaction using gelatin-based stimuli deliveredorally. Using a relatively new psychophysical method, the Single-Interval AdjustmentMatrix task, we estimated vanillin thresholds for five healthy participants samplingsmall vanillin flavored gels. Our data demonstrate the feasibility of using solid-stategustatory stimuli to assess retronasal perception