NICE, France (AP) – The doctor slipped a miniature camera into the patient’s right nostril, making his entire nose glow red with his bright miniature light.
“Tickle a little, don’t you?” she asked as he rummaged through her nasal passages, the discomfort causing tears in her eyes and rolling down her cheeks.
The patient, Gabriella Forgione, was not complaining. The 25-year-old pharmacy worker was happy to be pushed and beaten at a hospital in Nice, southern France, to advance her quest to regain her sense of smell. Along with his sense of taste, he suddenly disappeared when he 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 proves harsh to her body and mind. Stolen by good and bad smells, Forgione loses weight and self-confidence.
“Sometimes I wonder, ‘Can I? “, She confessed. “Normally, I wear perfume and I like things to smell nice. I can’t smell it bothers me very much. ”
One year after the coronavirus pandemic, doctors and researchers are still struggling to better understand and treat the accompanying epidemic of COVID-19-related anosmia – loss of odor – draining much of life’s joy from an increasing number of long-term sensory frustrations. sufferers like Forgione.
Even specialists say that there is a lot about the condition that they do not yet know and learn as they go through their diagnosis and treatments. Odor damage and alteration have 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, olfactory problems are temporary, often improving on their own in a few weeks. But a small minority complain of persistent dysfunction long after other COVID-19 symptoms have disappeared. Some have reported continuous total or partial loss of odor six months after infection. The longest ones, some doctors say, are approaching a full year ago.
Researchers working on painful disability say they are optimistic that most will eventually recover, but fear that some will not. Some doctors are concerned that an increasing number of odorless patients, many of them young, may be more prone to depression and other difficulties and could affect tense health systems.
“They are losing their color in their lives,” said Dr. Thomas Hummel, who runs the ambulatory odor and taste clinic at Dresden University Hospital in Germany.
“These people will survive and succeed in their lives, in their professions,” Hummel added. “But their lives will be much poorer.”
At the Face and Neck University Institute in Nice, Dr. Clair Vandersteen sank tube after tube of odors under Forgione’s nose after taking root in her nostrils with his camera.
“Do you see any smell? Nothing? Zero? OK, ”he asked, as she repeatedly and apologized in the negative.
Only the last tube provoked an unequivocal reaction.
“Urgh! Oh, that smells, ”Forgione shouted. “Over!”
Complete test, Vandersteen presented his diagnosis.
“You need 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 homework: six months of olfactory rehabilitation. Twice a day, choose two or three scented things, such as a sprig of lavender or jars of perfume, and smell them for two to three minutes, he ordered.
“If you smell something, great. If not, no problem. Try again, concentrating hard to imagine lavender, a beautiful purple flower, ”he said. “You have to persevere.”
Losing your sense of smell can be more than just an inconvenience. Smoke from a spreading fire, a gas leak or the smell of rotten food can go dangerously unnoticed. The smoke from the diaper used, the dog’s dirt on the shoe or the sweaty armpits can be embarrassingly ignored.
And as poets have long known, smells and emotions are often like lovers.
Evan Cesa used to enjoy mealtimes. I’m a chore now. A fish dinner in September, which suddenly seemed tasteless for the first time to the 18-year-old sports student that COVID-19 attacked his senses. Foods have become simple textures, with only residual hints of sweet and salty.
Five months later, breakfast of chocolate cakes before class, Cesa was still chewing happily, as if swallowing cardboard.
“It doesn’t make sense for me to eat,” he said. “It’s just a waste of time.”
Cesa is one of the anosmia patients studied by researchers in Nice who, before the pandemic, used perfumes in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. They also used comforting perfumes to treat post-traumatic stress among children after a terrorist truck attack in Nice in 2016, when a driver showed up among the holiday crowds, killing 86 people.
Researchers are now turning their expertise to COVID-19, teaming up with perfume makers in the nearby town of Grasse, a perfume maker. Perfumer Aude Galouye worked on the fragrant skies that flowed under Cesa’s nose to measure her olfactory insufficiency, with smells at different concentrations.
“The sense of smell is a feeling that is fundamentally forgotten,” Galouye said. “We don’t realize the effect it has on our lives, except, of course, when we don’t have it anymore.”
Examinations on Cesa and other patients also include tests of language and attention. Researchers in Nice are exploring whether olfactory complaints are related to COVID-related cognitive difficulties, including concentration problems. Cesa was prevented from choosing the word “ship” when “kayak” was the obvious choice in a test.
“This is completely unexpected,” said Magali Payne, the team’s speech therapist. “This young man should not face language problems.”
“We have to keep digging,” she said. “We find out as we see patients.”
Cesa longs to restore his senses, to celebrate the taste of pasta in carbonara sauce, his favorite dish and to run through the fragrant wonders of the open air.
“You might think it’s not important to be able to smell nature, trees, forests,” he said. “But when you lose your sense of smell, you realize how lucky we really are to be able to smell these things.”
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