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Olfactory disorders are noted in a majority of neurodegenerative diseases, but they are often misjudged and are rarely rated in the clinical setting. Severe changes in the olfactory tests are observed in Parkinson's disease. Olfactory deficits are an early feature in Alzheimer's disease and they worsen with the disease progression. Alterations in the olfactory function are also noted after severe head injuries, temporal lobe epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, and migraine. The purpose of the present review was to discuss the available scientific knowledge on the olfactory memory and to relate its impairment with neurodegenerative diseases.

Introduction: In a dynamic and stressful environment like medical field, where one has to be a lifelong learner, any tool that will simplify and facilitate the learning process and improve the learning outcome is welcome. Awareness of metacognitive knowledge along with its sub components is one such tool. Method: This cross sectional study was done on all the first year medical students in a college in South India. Metacognitive knowledge questionnaire (testing procedural, declarative and conditional knowledge), a validated tool was administered to all the students. Cumulative academic scores of the full academic year of I MBBS were considered. Data was analysed using ANOVA and Spearson's correlation tests on SPSS version 22. Results: Metacognitive knowledge has a linear relation with academic performance as does its sub components. Metacognitive knowledge and its subcomponents show a statistically significant positive correlation with academic scores. Conclusion: As educators, designing and inculcation of strategies to improve metacognitive knowledge would empower the students and be the key for their academic success.

The changes in Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and Heart Rate Recovery (HRR) coincide well with the changes in physical training status in patient populations. But a deep probing in this area reveals that enough attention has not been paid so far to the healthy population, especially those who undergo deliberate training. This study was conducted to quantify the effect of nine months of basic police training in HRV/HRR among a sample of women police recruits of Kerala state. Consequently, the training was found to be effective in altering the parasympathetic and nonlinear control of the cardiovascular system. The statistical analysis using dependent sample t-test showed that there was a significant alteration of linear and nonlinear HRV measures and HRR features prior to post-training. The study also investigated the discriminatory potential of five-minutes each of supine HRV and post-exercise HRR in classifying the recruits into trained and untrained status. The optimal HRV/HRR feature set that could discriminate the training status with the highest accuracy were identified by using Genetic Algorithm-Artificial Neural Network (GA-ANN) and Genetic Algorithm-Support Vector Machine (GA-SVM) based wrapper functions. A reduction in HRV feature set to 50% and HRR feature set to 68.5% was found using the GA optimization. While classifying, the SVM classifier outperformed the ANN with maximum accuracy (89.7%) using the reduced feature set of HRR. The results promise objective selection of welltrained candidates to professions which demand high physical fitness.