Chairman's Note - Penn Medicine - University of Pennsylvania

OtOrhinOlaryngOlOgy - head and neck Surgery at the univerSity Of PennSylvania
Research Roundup
Early Sensory Changes in Patients
with Neurodegenerative Diseases
Researchers have
long suspected that
environmental
agents, including
toxins and viruses,
may be catalysts for
a number of
neurodegenerative
Richard L. Doty, PhD
diseases, including
Alzheimer’s disease
and Parkinson’s disease. Professor Richard
L. Doty, PhD, of Penn’s Department of
Otorhinolaryngology –Head and Neck
Surgery, a renowned expert in the olfactory
system, is exploring the possibility that
some cases of neurodegenerative disease
may be initiated or catalyzed by
environmental agents that enter the brain
via the olfactory pathways. Recently he and
his colleagues have shown that young
individuals exposed to high levels of
pollution in Mexico City exhibit olfactory
dysfunction and evidence, at autopsy, the
pathology of Alzheimer’s disease in their
olfactory bulbs.
4 WWW.uPhS.uPenn.edu/PennOrl
In 1968, Dr. Doty received his MA degree
from California State University, San Jose, in
conjunction with the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA), where
he studied the vestibular system of humans.
He obtained his PhD degree in
Comparative Psychology from Michigan
State University in 1973, specializing in
olfaction. He subsequently completed a
postdoctoral fellowship in Behavioral
Endocrinology at the University of
California, Berkeley. Presently he is the
Director of the University of Pennsylvania’s
Smell and Taste Center, which he cofounded
in 1980. He is perhaps best known
for developing the University of
Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test
(UPSIT), the most widely used quantitative
test of olfactory function in the world. This
test has been heralded as the “eye chart of
the nose” and has been translated into over
a dozen foreign languages. Dr. Doty, who
has published more than 350 scientific
articles, chapters, and books on taste and
smell, was the 2005 recipient of the
Association for Chemoreception Science’s
Max Mozell Award for Outstanding
Achievement in the Chemical Senses, the
highest honor that can be bestowed by the
peers of his profession.
As a result of funding from the Department
of Defense, Dr. Doty and his team are
currently examining sensory changes that
occur in the earliest stages of Parkinson’s
disease. Extensive behavioral and
electrophysiological assessment of all the
major senses is being made before and after
dopamine therapy. These results are being
compared to those from SPECT imaging of
the dopamine transporter within the
nigrostrial region of the brain, the brain
region where the motor symptoms of this
disease arise. His research is important not
only for better defining the non-motor
elements of this disease, but for
understanding their dependence upon
dopamine dysfunction, their relationship to
one another, and whether some
combination of sensory measures may
ultimately be useful in identifying people at
risk for the disorder. In the future, such
detection may allow for early therapeutic
intervention before irreversible neural
degeneration has occurred.
Dr. Doty notes, “Before the development
of the UPSIT, the influences of a wide
range of diseases on the ability to smell
were unknown. As a result of this single
development, we now know that a number
of neurological disorders are heralded by
olfactory dysfunction. A key question is
whether such dysfunction aids in
understanding the etiology of such
disorders, a question that is currently
being addressed in laboratories
throughout the world.”