Dr Anna Oleszkiewicz from the Institute of Psychology at the University of Wrocław received the award for scientific achievements in 2018, funded by the Research section on the Smoke and Taste of the German Otorhinolaryngological Society.

The award was granted during a conference in Bern, where Dr. Oleszkiewicz presented new age standards of the most popular test of smell “Sniffin ‘Sticks”, developed on a sample of over 9100 people. She published an article on this subject in the journal European Archives of Oto-rhino-laryngology.

According to the test results, new standards of sex and age were necessary because the previous normative values were based on smaller sample sizes – especially in the group of older individuals. After developing the results of the new tests, a significant effect of sex and age on the olfactory efficiency was observed. The most pronounced was the increase in the olfactory test results between 5 and 20 years of age and a dramatic decline between the ages of 60 and 71.