Thread by @bopinion

About four out of five Covid-19 patients suffer a partial or total loss of smell, a condition known as anosmia. Many have no other symptoms.

It’s got nothing to do with stuffy noses; it’s all about the havoc the coronavirus wreaks on our nervous systems
bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

Many patients recover their sense of smell, or olfaction, quickly. Others smell less (hyposmia) or scent odors wrong (parosmia):

👤A spouse suddenly smells like a stranger
📦Wine like cardboard
☕️Sewage like coffee

For some people, it never comes back bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

Smell has long been our most underrated sense, writes @andreaskluth

Perhaps that’s why we know relatively little about it. Claire Hopkins, aka @SnotSurgeon, says the science of olfaction, compared to that of vision or hearing, is still in the Stone Age bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

👃 But that could change. A year into the pandemic, olfaction is one of the hottest scenes in medicine.

There’s now even a Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research, where scientists from more than 60 countries collaborate to learn about Covid and smell bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

🧠The perception of an odor shoots directly from our nasal receptors into our brains, bypassing the thalamus and immediately triggering a memory or emotion.

By contrast, vision, hearing and touch must take several additional synaptic hops bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

The very richness of our smell universe means that we have no vocabulary to describe it adequately.

Being at a loss for words — think back to your most recent wine tasting — we can mistake vision for being the more important sense bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

Yet, the merest whiff can pick up pheromones that trigger various emotions long before the rest of our brain has even formulated a single thought, including:

😰Fear
😡Aggression
❤️Love
💏Intimacy bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

It’s only when smell is gone that people wake up to its vital role. Many sufferers:

➡️Lose their appetite or confidence
➡️Experience a drop in libido
➡️Fall into depression

Parosmia can be even worse, leaving people destabilized, unmoored and estranged bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

Hyperosmia -- or an increased sense of smell -- also exists. It often happens if you’re:

🤰🏾Pregnant
🧠Have epilepsy
🍀Or genetically lucky bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

Take Joy Milne, a retired nurse in Scotland, whose sense of smell is closer to dogs than people. She can even scent diseases:

🍞Alzheimer’s smells like rye bread
💅🏽Diabetes like nail polish
🍄Cancer like mushrooms bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

Decades before her husband died of Parkinson’s, she realised he was sick because his odor had changed from “purple,” as she describes it, to “brown.”

She’s now helping researchers in Manchester to create a diagnostic test bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

Thanks to the pandemic, we’re now realizing that a healthy smell is essential to our well-being.

Before Covid, people who lost their olfaction rarely got much attention from their doctors or sympathy from loved ones. That’s over now bloom.bg/2MUHjAx

Anosmia, hyposmia and parosmia are finally recognized as serious diseases and promising fields of study, with scientific breakthroughs likely to follow.

Have you suffered from a change in your sense of smell during the pandemic? bloom.bg/2MUHjAx