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NICE, France (AP) – The doctor slipped a miniature camera into the patient’s right nostril, making her entire nose glow red with his brilliant miniature light.
“Tickle a little, eh?” He asked as he rummaged around his nasal passages, the discomfort causing tears in his eyes and rolling down his cheeks.
The patient, Gabriella Forgione, was not complaining. The 25-year-old pharmacy worker was happy to be pushed and stung at a hospital in Nice, southern France, to further her increasingly pressing quest to regain her sense of smell. With her sense of taste, it suddenly disappeared when she fell ill with COVID-19 in November, and none returned.
Being deprived of the pleasures of food and the smells of the things she loves is hard on her body and mind. Rid of good and bad smells, Forgione loses weight and self-confidence.
“Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Do I stink? », She confessed. “Normally I wear perfume and I like things to smell good. Not being able to smell bothers me a lot.
One year after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, doctors and researchers are still working to better understand and treat the accompanying epidemic of COVID-19-related anosmia – loss of smell – draining much of it of the joie de vivre of a growing number of suffering long-term sensorially frustrated people like Forgione.
Even medical specialists say there is a lot about the disease that they still don’t know, and that they learn as they get diagnosed and treated. Impaired and altered smell has 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, smell problems are temporary and often improve on their own within a few weeks. But a small minority complain of persistent dysfunction long after other symptoms of COVID-19 have subsided. Some have reported a total or partial loss of smell six months after infection. The longest, some doctors say, are now approaching a full year.
Researchers working on the annoying disability say they are optimistic most will eventually recover, but fear some will not. Some doctors fear that a growing number of patients with no sense of smell, many of whom are young, are more prone to depression and other difficulties and put strain on strained health systems.
“They lose color in their lives,” said Dr Thomas Hummel, who heads the outpatient smells and tastes clinic at the University Hospital in Dresden, Germany.
“These people will survive and be successful in their lives, in their professions,” added Hummel. “But their life will be much poorer.”
At the University Institute of the Face and Neck in Nice, Dr Clair Vandersteen passed tube after tube of odors under Forgione’s nose after searching her nostrils with her camera.
“Do you see a smell? Nothing? Zero? OK, ”he asked, as she repeatedly answered and apologized with negatives.
Only the last tube caused an unequivocal reaction.
“Urgh! Oh, that stinks, ”Forgione yelped. “Fish!”
Test completed, Vandersteen issued his diagnosis.
“It takes a huge amount of 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 away with her homework: six months of olfactory rehabilitation. Twice a day, pick two or three scented things, like a sprig of lavender or jars of perfume, and smell them for two to three minutes, he ordered.
“If you smell something, that’s fine. Otherwise, no problem. Try again, focusing on the image of lavender, a beautiful purple flower, ”he says. “You must keep trying.”
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 all go dangerously unnoticed. Fumes 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 lovers entwined.
Evan Cesa loved meals. Now that is a chore. A fish dinner in September that suddenly seemed tasteless first signaled to the 18-year-old athletic student that COVID-19 had attacked his senses. Foods have become simple textures, with only residual notes of sweet and savory.
Five months later, eating chocolate cookies before class, Cesa was still chewing mirthlessly, as if swallowing cardboard.
“Eating has no purpose for me anymore,” he says. “It’s just a waste of time.”
Cesa is one of the people with anosmia studied by researchers from Nice who, before the pandemic, used perfumes in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. They also used heartwarming scents to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in children after a terrorist attack on a truck in Nice in 2016, when a driver walked through the holiday crowds, killing 86 people.
Researchers are now turning to COVID-19, teaming up with perfumers from the nearby perfume-producing town of Grasse. Perfumer Aude Galouye worked on the scented waxes that were floated under Cesa’s nose to measure her olfactory deficiency, with fragrances in varying concentrations.
“The sense of smell is a sense that is fundamentally forgotten,” said Galouye. “We don’t realize the effect it has on our lives except, of course, when we don’t have it anymore.
Tests on Cesa and other patients also include language and attention tests. The researchers in Nice are studying whether the olfactory complaints are linked to cognitive difficulties linked to COVID, including problems with concentration. Cesa stumbled by choosing the word “boat” when “kayak” was the obvious choice on a test.
“It’s completely unexpected,” said Magali Payne, the team’s speech therapist. “This young man shouldn’t have language problems.”
“We have to keep digging,” she said. “We find out by seeing patients.”
Cesa aspires to rediscover her senses, to celebrate the taste of pasta with carbonara sauce, her favorite dish, and to explore the fragrant wonders of the great outdoors.
“You might think that it’s not important to be able to smell nature, trees, forests,” he says. “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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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
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