Covid-19: Science explains the lack of smell after recovery

One study was conducted and published on December 21 in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The research was done by scientists at Duke University Hospital who apparently managed to determine what is behind the prolonged symptoms after the individual has contracted a yeast infection Covid-19.

Read more: Covid-19 in China: new cases lead to lack of food and medicine in Beijing

Why do people lose their sense of smell?

According to researchers, there is a continuous immune attack against nerve cells. sense of smell, which leads to a decline in the number of these cells, which causes the symptom of lack of smell.

It is common knowledge that people who have had Covid-19 may, even for a brief moment, have experienced a change in their sense of smell. Some of them only get that sense back after about two weeks, but some never fully recover it. Scientists are still trying to understand this phenomenon.

Associate professor of the Department of Head and Neck Surgery and Communication Sciences, Bradley Goldstein, said in a statement that the findings made by this study can greatly help research that focuses on other prolonged symptoms of the virus, which are derived from inflammation similar.

The study analyzes were performed using samples of olfactory cells, which were collected from 24 biopsies. Nine of these volunteers still have no sense of smell, even long after they caught the disease. With a very detailed analysis, it was possible to verify that there was an infiltration of cells of the immune system, which act as an inflammatory response in the nasal tissue. That is, the place where the cells responsible for smell are.

It has also been shown that the number of olfactory sensory neurons has significantly decreased, which may have derived from the damage caused to the tissue, which is quite delicate, because of the inflammation that was perceived.

Finally, among symptoms and the most common long-term sequelae after Covid-19 infection, we have:

• Headache;
• Insomnia;
• Fatigue, tiredness, weakness and malaise;
• Loss of taste and smell;
• Shortness of breathe;
• muscle weakness and/or pain;
• Difficulty in reasoning/concentration, memory and language;
• Anxiety and depression;
• Fibrosis in the kidneys and/or lungs;
• Worse in diseases that already existed.

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