A four-year review of the complaint of reduced sense of smell referred to the Fars legal medicine during the years 2014 – 2017

Abstract The sense of smell has an important impact on human life and in the prevention of accidents and safety. Odor disorder exposes the person to the risk of not detecting fire or gas leakage, eating spoiled or poisonous foods. The present study is a four-year analytical study of complaints of olfactory sensation referred to forensic medicine in Fars province. In this cross-sectional study, information of all cases in the archive whom had referred to forensic medicine in Fars province during 1396-1393, including age, commission date and date of commission renewal, gender, marital status, education, type of accident, diagnosis method, commission opinion and the type of certificate issued by a forensic examiner for other injuries was collected and analyzed. A total of 148 complainants, including 109 males (73.5%) and 39 females (26.5%) with mean age31/34±5/76 were studied. People aged 20 to 39 years were the most frequent group.Most of the complainantshad a decreased sense of smell because of accident with frequency of 91.9%, MRI was the most common method used to detect olfactory loss. Of the 148 cases, 124 (83.8%) were confirmed a decrease in the sense of smell. The average age of people with a lowered sense of smell is lower than global statistics. Accidents are the most common cause of olfactory decline, which is why it is important to carry out further studies on olfactory decline.