My disorder followed a bad cold - probably because swollen sinuses covered up my odorant receptors, the experts tell me. Nerve damage caused by Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, poor nutrition, brain tumors, Parkinson's disease and other conditions can interrupt the normal flow of information from your nose to your brain. Lots of things! Aging is a risk factor, as are swollen sinuses, nasal polyps, heavy drinking, brain damage, and a history of dry mouth, according to NIDCD. What else besides COVID-19 can damage the sense of smell? And then there's phantosmia, where people smell things that aren't there at all.
Some smell one thing for another - that's parosmia. Others, like me, have only a partial sense of accurate odor detection - hyposmia. Some folks can't smell anything at all - that's called anosmia. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the division of the National Institutes of Health that deals with taste and smell, says 23% of Americans over age 40 report some alteration in their sense of smell, as do 32% of those over 80 - and that's from data gathered long before the COVID-19 pandemic. So how come I can't even smell a freshly opened bar of chocolate? The cover of Nature Neuroscience that week actually had a photo of a blindfolded volunteer facedown in a field, tracking a scent.) The humans weren't nearly as good at the task as the dogs were, but did get better with practice. In 2006, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley reported that they'd trained humans to track a trail of chocolate essential oil laid down in an open field. Shots - Health News Her Incredible Sense Of Smell Is Helping Scientists Find New Ways To Diagnose Disease That got me thinking - what does it really mean to have a disordered sense of smell? Does it matter that with my eyes closed I can't tell if I'm in an overripe gym or a perfume store? And is there hope that I'll ever again be able to smell a wet dog or freesia or a gas leak or a raw onion? My taste buds still work, and I adore fine chocolate.īut when COVID-19 hit, the inability to detect odors and fragrances became a diagnostic symptom that upset a lot of COVID-19 sufferers, many of whom also lost their sense of taste. I always figured there wasn't much I could do about that, and it hasn't been terrible. Since then, my olfactory discernment comes and goes, and most of the time it's just gone. Though the humans weren't nearly as proficient as the dogs, they did get better with practice.Ībout 25 years ago, after a particularly bad cold, I suddenly lost my sense of smell - I could no longer sense the difference between sweaty tennis shoes and a fragrant rose. Scientists once compared the abilities of humans versus canines in tracking a trail of chocolate essential oil laid down in an open field.
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