As researchers continue to study the long-term and long-term effects after infection with the new coronavirus, new reports reiterate so-called “long haulers” experiencing a distorted sense of smell, picking up strange and unpleasant odors of fish, sulfur and burning.
Professor Nirmal Kumar, a surgeon specializing in otorhinolaryngology and president of ENT UK, attributed the sense of distorted smell to parosmia, calling it “very strange and unique”, according to a report by Sky News. According to the National Institutes of Health, parosmia signals an altered “odor perception”, “or when something that normally smells nice now stinks”.
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Although reports of long-distance coronavirus experiencing unpleasant odors appeared earlier this year, parosmia has not yet entered the list of coronavirus-related symptoms at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), although the agency notes that the list “does not include all possible symptoms.”
“CDC will continue to update this list as we learn more about COVID-19,” says the agency’s web page. An expert had already worked out the sense of smell in the context of viral pathogens for Fox News.
As researchers continue to study the long-term and long-term effects after infection with the new coronavirus, new reports reiterate so-called “long haulers” experiencing a distorted sense of smell, picking up strange and unpleasant odors of fish, sulfur and burning.
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“There are two sensory systems in our nose. We are able to detect pleasant fragrances through the olfactory nerve, while dangerous and toxic smells are detected by the trigeminal nerve,” Dr. Susan Shin, assistant professor of neurology at Mount Sinai Hospital, said previously to Fox News. “The trigeminal nerve is probably more resistant to the effects of a viral pathogen compared to the olfactory nerve because we need it to detect dangers in our environment, such as smelling smoke from a fire.”
Kumar said thousands of patients across the UK are under treatment for loss of smell, called anosmia, and some now experience rather unpleasant odors associated with parosmia, according to the report. The professor explained that the patients’ distorted smell comes from “olfactory hallucinations”.
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Earlier this spring, Kumar and ENT UK reported an increasing number of patients coming to clinics with “a sudden and unexplained loss of smell”. Kumar says the organization was one of the first to suggest that patients’ loss of smell was due to coronavirus infection.
“This virus has an affinity for the nerves in the head and, in particular, the nerve that controls smell,” the professor told the agency. “But it probably affects other nerves as well and it affects, we think, neurotransmitters – the mechanisms that send messages to the brain.”
“What this means is that the virus is affecting the nerves in the roof of the nose – it’s like a shock to the nervous system and the nerves are not working,” added Kumar, in another report.
While a 24-year-old patient in the UK, Daniel Salvaki, reported a “burning sulfur odor” since he briefly lost his nose for two weeks in March, another patient in her 50s described the phenomenon as “disgusting” and spoke of a “sickly sweet smell”.
“Most things smelled disgusting, that sickly sweet smell that is hard to describe, as I’ve never seen it before,” Lynn Corbett, of Selsey, England, told Sky News.
Chrissi Kelly, board member of AbScent, a UK charity that supports smell disorders, advised affected people to avoid foods that cause unpleasant smells, eat foods at room temperature or cold to contain the rising smells and choose foods simple and tasteless like rice and pasta, however.
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A separate survey in late October at King’s College London UK looked at the symptoms of 4,182 coronavirus patients who registered their disease using a COVID Symptom Study app. They observed that 558 of the patients saw the symptoms last more than 28 days, while 189 suffered for more than eight weeks, and 95 patients with symptoms reported that they lasted more than 12 weeks.
The researchers found that, among patients with long COVID, symptoms were more commonly listed as fatigue, headache, dyspnoea and anosmia, and were more likely to occur in older patients, with higher BMI and in patients with women. According to the most recent reports, the distorted smell, or parosmia, can affect younger patients and medical professionals more.
Alexandria Hein and Amy McGorry of Fox News contributed to this report.