Dementia 'can prevent people from identifying flavours'

People living with dementia can lose the ability to accurately recognise the flavours in food, a new scientific study claims.

Researchers in from the US and London made the discovery when investigating what causes people living with dementia to change their food preferences and select "unusual" food combinations.

Patients with the degenerative disease experience a loss of meaning of words and eventually other things in the world at large, according to the study.

During the research, patients with dementia were still able to taste flavours and establish whether they were pleasant or not, but they were not able to identify what the flavours were and what appropriate combinations were.

The findings are reported in the Cortex journal, with the article concluding that this research offers a new perspective on how the brain stores information and how this is affected by dementia.

According to the Alzheimer's Research Trust, there are currently around 820,000 people in the UK living with dementia.