NICE, France (AP) – The doctor slid a miniature camera into the patient’s right nostril and made her entire nose shine red with its bright miniature light.
“Tickle a little, right?” he asked as he crossed her nose, the discomfort that caused tears to wash down her eyes and roll down her cheeks.
The patient, Gabriella Forgione, does not complain. The 25-year-old pharmacist was fortunate to be spotted at the hospital in Nice, in the south of France, to promote her increasingly urgent quest to restore her sense of smell. Along with her sense of taste, it suddenly disappeared when she fell ill with COVID-19 in November, and none returned.
Depriving the pleasure of food and the flavors of things she loves is difficult for her body and mind. Separated from good and bad smells, Forgione loses weight and confidence.
“Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Do I stink? ‘, She confessed. ‘I usually wear perfume and like things to smell nice. The fact that I can not smell bothers me a lot. ”
A year after the coronavirus pandemic, doctors and researchers are still striving to better understand and treat the associated epidemic of COVID-19-related anosmia – loss of odor – through an increasing number of sensually frustrated long-term joy sufferers such as Forgione .
Even specialist doctors believe that there is a lot about the condition that they do not yet know and that they are learning in their diagnoses and treatments. Weakness and odor change have become so common in COVID-19 that some researchers suggest that simple odor tests can be used to detect coronavirus infections in countries with few laboratories.
For most people, the odor problems are temporary and improve on their own over weeks. But a small minority complain of persistent dysfunction long after other COVID-19 symptoms have disappeared. Some reported persistent or partial odor loss six months after infection. According to doctors, the longest is now a full year.
Researchers who are concerned about the debilitating disability say they are optimistic that most will eventually recover, but fear that some will not. Some doctors are concerned that increasing numbers of patients who are not exposed to the odor, many of whom are young, may be more prone to depression and other problems, and this can be hampered for strained health systems.
“They lose color in their lives,” says Dr. Thomas Hummel, who heads the Odor and Taste Clinic at the University Hospital in Dresden, Germany.
“These people will survive and will be successful in their lives, in their careers,” Hummel added. “But they will be much poorer.”
At the Face and Neck University Institute in Nice, dr. Clair Vandersteen hovered tube after tube smells under Forgione’s nose after rooting with her camera in her nostrils.
Do you feel any odor? Nothing? Zero? OK, ”he asked as she repeatedly and apologetically reacted negatively.
Only the last tube elicited an unequivocal response.
‘Urgh! Oh, it stinks, ‘Forgione yelled. ‘Fish!’
Test completed, Vandersteen made his diagnosis.
“You need an enormous amount of smell to be able to smell something,” he told her. “You did not lose your sense of smell, but neither did you.”
He sends her away with homework: six months of odor recovery. Twice a day, pick two or three fragrant things, such as a sprig of lavender or bottles of fragrances, and smell it for two to three minutes, he ordered.
“If you smell anything, great. If not, no problem. Try again and concentrate hard on imagining the lavender, a beautiful purple flower, ‘he said. “You have to persevere.”
Losing your sense of smell can be more than just an inconvenience. Smoking from a burning fire, a gas leak or the stink of rotten food can all go unnoticed. Vapors from a used diaper, the dirt of the dog on a shoe or sweaty armpits can be ignored embarrassingly.
And as poets have long known, fragrances and emotions are often like entangled lovers.
Evan Cesa used to enjoy mealtimes. Now they are a task. A fish dinner in September that suddenly seemed tasteless, the 18-year-old sports student first noticed that COVID-19 was attacking his senses. Food has become mere textures, with only remaining hints of sweet and salty.
When Cesa had breakfast on chocolate cookies in front of the classes five months later, she was still chewing without joy as if she had swallowed cardboard.
“Eating has no purpose for me anymore,” he said. “It’s just a waste of time.”
Cesa is one of the anosmic sufferers studied by researchers in Nice, who used scents before the pandemic in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. They also used comforting scents to treat post-traumatic stress among children after a truck terror attack in Nice in 2016, when a driver plowed through the crowds of the holiday. 86 kill people.
The researchers are now directing their expertise at COVID-19 and working with perfumers from the nearby fragrance-producing city of Grasse. The perfumer Aude Galouye washed the fragrant wax that was blown under Cesa’s nose to measure its olfactory function, with fragrances in different concentrations.
“The sense of smell is a feeling that is fundamentally forgotten,” Galouye said. “We do not realize the effect it has on our lives unless we no longer have it.”
The investigations on Cesa and other patients also include language and attention tests. The researchers from Nice are investigating whether odor complaints are related to COVID-related cognitive problems, including concentration problems. Cesa stumbled upon choosing the word ‘ship’ when ‘kayak’ was the obvious choice on one test.
“It’s completely unexpected,” said Magali Payne, a speech therapist on the team. “This young man should not have language problems.”
“We have to keep digging,” she said. “We figure things out the way we see patients.”
Cesa longs to restore his senses, to celebrate the taste of pasta in carbonara sauce, his favorite dish and a stroll through the fragrant wonders of the outdoors.
“One would think that it is not important to smell nature, trees, forests,” he said. “But when you lose your sense of smell, you realize how happy we are to be able to smell these things.”
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