Here’s the latest news from the pandemic.
Covid’s effect on smell
Alex McCutchan was a fit, freshly minted doctor when she caught the coronavirus working in a Melbourne hospital. More than a year later, she’s still suffering, and the science trickling in attempting to explain why is alarming.
Most people assume that when initial symptoms abate, the virus just goes away in a couple of weeks. But now, there’s a suspicion that it could persist in some form in the body and brain, causing additional damage that might not appear for years. And there are millions who might be vulnerable.
McCutchan, 27, has a front row seat as scientists peel back the curtain on the unfolding fate of Covid long haulers. She met neuroscientist Leah Beauchamp in 2012, when both were preparing to embark on their first year studying at the University of Melbourne.
The women became best friends and shared a house as post-grads. Now, they’re on either side of one of the most common and lingering symptoms of Covid — smell and taste disturbances—as one suffers through the experience and the other studies the long-term implications.
“Knowing people like Leah, I know that there are likely going to be some long-term illnesses that people like me will be unlucky enough to get,” McCutchan says. “I might get Parkinson’s in my 50s or 60s. We just don’t know what’s going to happen.”
On this week’s episode of the Prognosis podcast, we look at what causes almost half of all Covid sufferers to experience a complete or partial loss of their sense of smell, why this invisible condition can linger, and how it can lead to a profound disruption to daily life, mood and relationships.
We also look at the research underway to understand the coronavirus’s effect on the body’s odor-sensing organ, and its propensity to invade the central nervous system and damage the brain.
The coronavirus targets a protein on the surface of cells that line the airways—from the nose to the furthest reaches of the lungs. Inside the nasal cavity, the cells the coronavirus infects are right alongside the nerves that tell the brain what odors are being detected.
“This area of the nose is fascinating,” Beauchamp says. “It’s actually an area of your body where your central nervous system is exposed to the environment, and that makes that region particularly vulnerable.”
Because Covid affects so many different brain regions and functions, like memory, it might predispose people to neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. There was a surge in cases of Parkinson’s in the decades following the massive 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic.
If a similar effect were to occur in the wake of Covid, Beauchamp says, it could cripple health systems.
“We’re trying to listen to those warning bells, I think, because we don’t want to be caught off guard,” she says. “We need to be really prepared. And the only way we’re going to do that is to keep studying it and preparing as best we can.”—Jason Gale
Track the recovery
Nearly two years after the first cases of Covid were reported in China, two pills have emerged that even skeptical scientists are hailing as a potential turning point in the pandemic. Read the full story here.
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"smell" - Google News
November 09, 2021 at 07:30PM
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The Lingering Condition of Loss of Sense of Smell - Bloomberg
"smell" - Google News
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