On the morning after Christmas 2020, Carolyn Hinds woke up and realized she couldn’t smell or taste anything. Other signs of COVID-19, like fever, cough and muscle aches, came in the following days. Those symptoms subsided with time, but her lack of smell and taste did not.
To this day, Hinds, 38, can barely smell anything, and her sense of taste remains warped—sweet things leave a strange aftertaste, salty foods upset her stomach and spice makes her lips and tongue burn but tastes like nothing. “These things will mess with you mentally and physically because it changes the way you experience the world,” she says.
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Perhaps worst of all, Hinds’ doctors have said they don’t know how to treat her. “It’s been 10 months,” she says. “I’m kind of thinking this is how it will be [forever].”
Almost two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, lots of people are in Hinds’ position. Smell loss isn’t a COVID-specific phenomenon—it can happen due to other viruses, neurologic disorders, smoking, head injuries and normal aging, among other causes—but the pandemic has greatly increased its prevalence.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus seems to infect and compromise the cells neighboring those that control smell, which can translate to smell loss, explains Dr. Carl Philpott, a professor of rhinology and olfactology at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia. Almost half of COVID-19 patients lose their sense of smell and about 40% lose their sense of taste, according to an international review of previously published studies. (Since much of flavor perception is related to smell, not taste, Philpott says some perceived taste loss may actually be smell loss.) According to preliminary research, as many as half of those individuals also develop what’s known as parosmia, which distorts scents—subbing in, say, the smell of spoiled milk where there should be the aroma of coffee.
“Prior to COVID, we didn’t really have a lot of treatments or interventions that we can use for…
Source : time
