Java junkies can sniff out even tiny amounts of coffee, and the more they drink, the better they can smell it, British researchers say.
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It’s a discovery with powerful implications for treating people addicted to substances with a distinct smell.
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“The higher the caffeine use, the quicker a person recognized the odor of coffee,” said study leader Lorenzo Stafford. He is an olfactory expert at the University of Portsmouth, in England.
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Not only could the regular coffee drinkers among the more than 90 volunteers quickly detect the aroma of a heavily diluted coffee chemical, their ability to do so increased with their level of craving, the findings showed.
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“The more they desired caffeine, the better their sense of smell for coffee,” Stafford said in a university news release.
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It’s the first evidence that java junkies are more sensitive to the smell of coffee, according to the study published recently in the journal Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology.
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Researchers had wondered if coffee drinkers and non-drinkers responded differently to the smell, and whether cravings might be related to an increased ability to detect it.
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Describing caffeine as the “most widely consumed psychoactive drug,” Stafford said the findings suggest that changes in the ability to detect smells could be a useful index of drug dependency.
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The study authors said their work could lead to new methods of aversion therapy to treat addiction to substances with a distinct smell, such as tobacco and marijuana.
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“We have known for some time that drug cues (for example, the smell of alcohol) can trigger craving in users, but here we show with a mildly addictive drug, that craving might be linked to an increased ability to detect that substance,” Stafford explained.
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Previous research revealed that people who were trained to associate an odor with something unpleasant later showed greater dislike of that odor. That suggests a possible model for conditioned odor aversion, the researchers said.
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SOURCE: University of Portsmouth, news release, May 14, 2019
