While it is not usual for the nose to be able to tell a lot about your health, we can tell you three things that your sense of smell, or not, just might be able to tell you.

Let’s have a look at 3 such surprising things that your nose can signal about your overall health and impending diseases if any.

A bad sense of smell may signal an early death

A bad sense of smell is acceptable if you have caught a bout of cold, but if your nose isn’t particularly good at doing its basic job–smelling– it may point towards some more deep-rooted issues regarding your health.

According to a study conducted by the University of Chicago Medical Center, the olfactory dysfunction predicts 5-year mortality rate in older adults. Basically, if you are not able to detect certain smells, there is an increased chance of dying within the next 5 years.

In the research, it was found that 39 percent of older adults who couldn’t smell odors like the rose, peppermint and orange died early as compared to 19 percent of people with okay-okay smell sense and 10 percent of people with good olfactory sense.

 Hallucinating smells? It can be migraine

f you are often smelling things in the air which are not quite around, we have a bad news for you too. According to a review of research conducted by the Montefiore Headache Center, imagining odors may be a part of the pre-migraine aura.

Poor smell detection may mean Alzheimer’s

A study conducted by the Harvard Medical School study directly links poor smelling abilities to the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

The research found that participants who had higher levels of amyloid plaques performed worse on odor identification test and had greater brain cell death.