Weird, distorted food smells haunt COVID-19 survivors

Marcel Kuttab You first felt something was wrong while brushing your teeth a year ago, several months after recovering from COVID-19.

His toothbrush tasted dirty, so he threw it away and bought a new one. Then he realized that what he tasted bad was toothpaste. The onions, garlic, and meat tasted putrid, and the coffee smelled like gasoline. All of these symptoms were symptoms of a once little-known disease called parosmia, which distorts the senses of smell and taste.

Kuttab, 28, who has a PhD in pharmacy and works for a pharmaceutical company in Massachusettss, he experimented to find out what foods he could tolerate. “You can spend a lot of money in the supermarket and end up using nothing,” he said.

The pandemic has highlighted the parosmia, which has spurred research and a large number of publications in medical journals.

New support groups have emerged and the number of members has increased in existing groups.. A UK-based Facebook parosmic group has grown rapidly and now has over 14,000 members. Parosmia-related startups are gaining traction, from podcasts to scent training kits.

But a key question remains unanswered: How long does the parosmia associated with COVID-19 last? Scientists do not have specific deadlines. Of the five patients interviewed for this article, all showing symptoms of parosmia since late spring and early summer last year, none have completely recovered their normal smell and taste.

Brooke ViegutThe 25-year-old, whose parosmia began in May 2020, worked for an entertainment company in New York City before theaters closed. He believes he contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 during a quick business trip to London and, like many other patients, has lost his sense of smell. Before he had fully recovered, he began to experience parosmia. I couldn’t tolerate garlic, onions or meat. He even said that at one point this year the broccoli smelled chemical.

And while you still can’t stand eating certain foods, you get more and more optimistic.

“Many fruits now taste more like fruit than soap,” he said. In addition, she recently took a trip without experiencing severe nausea. “I would say it’s an improvement.”

Before COVID-19, parosmia received relatively little attentionsaid Nancy Rawson, vice president and associate director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, an internationally renowned nonprofit research group.

“We could be in a big conference and one of the doctors could have a case or two,” Rawson said.

In a study At the start of 2005, most of the 56 cases examined were attributed to upper respiratory tract infections.

Today, scientists can identify more than 100 possible reasons for the loss and distortion of smell, including viruses, sinusitis, head trauma, chemotherapy, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s diseasesaid Zara Patel, associate professor of otolaryngology at Stanford University and director of endoscopic skull base surgery.

In 2020, parosmia has become noticeably widespread, frequently affecting patients with the novel coronavirus who have lost their sense of smell and then largely regained it before starting to experience distortions in their sense of taste and smell.

An article in June of last year in the magazine Chemical meaning, based on questionnaires, found that 7% of post-COVID-19 patients experienced a distortion of smell.

A subsequent study based on an online survey in the UK found that 6 months after the onset of COVID-19, 43% of patients who initially reported losing their sense of smell reported suffering from parosmia, according to an article in the publication Rhinology. This emergence occurred an average of 2.5 months after patients lost their sense of smell, the article reported.

This corresponds to the experience of Monique franklin 31 year old from Bergenfield, NJ, who used to have a keen sense of smell.

“I was one of those people who knew when to take out the trash,” said Franklin, an occupational therapist at the hospital. But in early April 2020, immediately after contracting COVID-19, he lost all sense of taste and smell.

Two months later, Franklin had parosmia Yes fantasy, a condition that causes a person to detect non-existent odors. She constantly had the impression that she was breathing in the smell of cigarettes at times when no one was smoking and that she was alone in her room.

the he and the onions are the main triggers of her parosmia, a particularly exhausting problem given that her boyfriend is italo–American and almost every Friday, she accompanies him to his family to do Pizza.

Now she carries her own pot of sauce without garlic.

For Janet Marple, 54, of Edina, Minnesota, the Coffee, the Peanut Butter and the feces they smell a bit of burnt rubber or a sickening odor. It is unlike anything you have ever felt in your life.

“I literally hold my breath when I wash my hair and do the laundry is a horrible experience. Even the fresh cut grass is terrible, ”said Marple, a former corporate banker.

Baffled by the avalanche of smell and taste problems, Scientists around the world are paying unusual attention to the human olfactory system, areas of the nose and brain where odors are processed.

They focused on the olfactory epithelium, a piece of tissue the size of a postage stamp behind the bridge of the nose. It is literally the nerve center for detecting smells and sending messages to the brain.

When people have colds, mucus and other fluids can block the nose, preventing odors from reaching the nerve center. But this type of blockage does not normally occur in patients with anosmia and parosmia caused by COVID-19.

Some researchers initially speculated that the virus extinguishes odors by attacking the thousands of olfactory neurons in this nerve center. But then they found the process to be more insidious.

These neurons are held together by a scaffold of support cells called support cells, which contain a protein called ANG2. A study published in July and led by Harvard researchers found that the protein acts as a code for the virus to enter and destroy supporting cells.

In summary, parosmia appears to be caused by damage to these cells, distorting and preventing key messages from reaching the brain, according to a theory important among some scientists.

As these cells repair themselves, they could make bad connections and send signals to the wrong repeater station in the brain. This, in turn, could lead to parosmia and phantosmia.

The National Institutes of Health launched a call for proposals in February to study the long-term side effects of COVID-19. Stanford’s Patel is currently recruiting people for a parosmia trial, preferably those who have had the disease for 6 months or more, but not as long as a year.

During, many patients turn to support groups for advice. These types of organizations existed in Europe before COVID-19, but none operated in the United States.

That’s why Katie Boeteng and two other women with anosmia created the first known group in the United States for people with smell and taste disorders in December.

The group is called Association of smell and taste of America (STANA). The women are working to gain nonprofit status, under the leadership of the Monell Center, to raise funds for studies of smell and taste disorders.

Boeteng, 31, of Plainfield, NJ, lost his sense of smell more than 12 years ago due to an upper respiratory infection. In 2018, he created The Smell Podcast of which he recorded more than 90 episodes, in which he interviewed patients, activists and scientists from all over the world.

The most well-known group in the world that helps people with these disorders is AbScent, a registered charity in England and Wales. AbScent only had 1,500 Facebook followers when the coronavirus hit; it now has more than 50,000.

For some who work in the medical field, altered odors can be disconcerting. Tracy Villafuerte developed parosmia about a year ago and, just as her sense of smell started to return, the aromas of coffee and other foods grew rancid.

Like other interviewees, Villafuerte, 44, sees a therapist. “I want to say something and at full volume. You have to learn some mechanics to be able to deal with this every day, ”he said.

Villafuerte, a certified medical assistant in Bolingbrook, Illinois, awaits the birth of her first granddaughter in early July and you wish you could smell the girl’s newborn baby.

“People often tell me: ‘You work in urology so that must be a blessing’ “, He said. “The truth is, I would give anything to smell urine.”

(c) The New York Times

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