NICE, France (AP) – The doctor slid a miniature camera into the patient’s right nostril, causing the entire nose to glow red with its miniature bright light.
“Tickles a little, eh?” he asked as he stirred his nasal passages, the discomfort causing a tear in his eyes and running down his cheeks.
The patient, Gabriella Forgione, did not complain. The 25-year-old pharmacy worker was happy to have been searched at a hospital in Nice, in the south of France, to advance her increasingly urgent search to regain her sense of smell. Along with his sense of taste, he suddenly disappeared when he fell ill with COVID-19 in November, and neither has returned.
Deprivation of the pleasures of food and the smells of the things you love is difficult for your body and mind. Worn out by odors, both good and bad, Forgione is losing weight and self-confidence.
“Sometimes I wonder,‘ Does it stink? ’” He confessed. “I usually wear perfume and I like that things can smell good. Not being able to smell bothers me a lot ”.
A year after the coronavirus pandemic, doctors and researchers are still struggling to better understand and treat the COVID-19-related anemia epidemic, the loss of odor, which achieves much of the joy. of the lives of a growing number of long-term sensory frustrations. patients like Forgione.
Even specialist doctors say there is a lot about the disease that they are still unaware of and that they learn as they progress in their diagnoses and treatments. Impairment and impaired sense of smell have become so common with COVID-19 that some researchers suggest that simple odor tests could be used to track coronavirus infections in countries with few laboratories.
For most people, olfactory problems are temporary, and often improve on their own in weeks. But a small minority complain of persistent dysfunction long after other symptoms of COVID-19 have disappeared. Some have reported continued total or partial odor loss six months after infection. The longest ones, according to some doctors, are close to a full year.
Researchers working on the annoying disability say they are optimistic that most will recover, but fear some will not. Some doctors are concerned that a growing number of odorless patients, many of them young, may be more prone to depression and other difficulties and affect tense health systems.
“They’re losing color in their lives,” said Dr. Thomas Hummel, who runs the Odor and Taste Outpatient Clinic at Dresden University Hospital, Germany.
“These people will survive and be successful in their lives, in their professions,” Hummel added. “But their lives will be much poorer.”
At the Face and Neck University Institute in Nice, Dr. Clair Vandersteen scattered tube after tube of odors under Forgione’s nose after rooting her nostrils with her camera.
“Do you smell anything? Nothing? Zero? Okay, ”she asked, as she responded repeatedly and apologized with negatives.
Only the last tube provoked an unequivocal reaction.
“Urgh! Oh, that stinks, ”Forgione shouted. “Fish!”
After the test, Vandersteen submitted his diagnosis.
“You need a huge smell to be able to smell something,” he told her. “You haven’t completely lost your sense of smell, but it’s not good either.”
He sent her homework: six months of olfactory rehabilitation. Twice a day, choose two or three scented things, like a sprig of lavender or jars of fragrances, and smell them for two or three minutes, he ordered.
“If you smell something, great. If not, no problem. Try it again, focusing on the image of lavender, a beautiful lilac flower, ”he said. “You have to persevere.”
Losing your sense of smell can be more than just an inconvenience. Smoke from a spreading fire, a gas leak, or the stench of rotten food can go dangerously unnoticed. Smoke from a used diaper, dog dirt on a shoe, or sweaty armpits can be embarrassingly ignored.
And as poets have long known, smells and emotions are often like intertwined lovers.
Evan Cesa used to enjoy meal times. They are a task now. A fish dinner in September that suddenly seemed insipid for the first time to the 18-year-old sports student that COVID-19 had attacked his senses. The food became simple textures, with only remnants of sweet and savory.
Five months later, eating chocolate chip cookies before class, Cesa was still chewing without joy, as if cardboard had been inserted.
“Food no longer has any purpose for me,” he said. “It’s just a waste of time.”
Cesa is one of the anemia patients studied by researchers in Nice who, before the pandemic, had used odors in diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. They also used comforting fragrances to treat children’s post-traumatic stress after a terrorist truck attack in Nice in 2016, when a driver plowed through holiday crowds, killing 86 people.
Researchers are turning their experience into COVID-19, a team with perfumers from the nearby fragrance-producing city of Grasse. Perfumer Aude Galouye worked on the scented waxes that escaped under Cesa’s nose to measure her olfactory deterioration, with odors at varying concentrations.
“Smell is a sense that is fundamentally forgotten,” Galouye said. “We don’t realize the effect it has on our lives except, obviously, when we no longer have it.”
Cesa and other patient exams also include language tests and care. Nice researchers explore whether olfactory complaints are related to COVID-related cognitive difficulties, including concentration problems. Cesa stumbled upon choosing the word “boat” when “kayaking” was the obvious choice in a test.
“This is completely unexpected,” said Magali Payne, the team’s speech therapist. “This young man should not suffer from language problems.”
“We have to keep digging,” he said. “We’re discovering things as we see patients.”
Cesa yearns to regain her senses, celebrate the taste of pasta in carbonara sauce, her favorite dish, and run through the wonderful fragrances of the outdoors.
“You might think it’s not important to be able to smell nature, the trees, the forests,” he said. “But when you lose your sense of smell, you realize how lucky we are to be able to smell these things.”
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