“Dead”, “rotten”, “slop” - thousands of people after the coronavirus pursue disgusting smells. What is Parosmia, how do they live with it and is there treatment?

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- I fell ill with coronavirus at the end of September, without pneumonia, but with the loss of smell. The smells disappeared for two weeks completely, then slowly began to return, but not all. By the beginning of January, I began to feel something strange: unpleasant unfamiliar smells interspersed with the stench, which actually was not-Kievka Nadezhda Kotenko suffers from steaming for the third month.

Parosmia is a poorly understood consequence of coronavirus, in which, instead of familiar smells, a person begins to feel a stench. Food, flowers, household chemicals begin to smell - according to various reviews - rot, slop, and dead.

- I had a shock, I did not connect it with Covid then. I thought that my roof was going, because no one spoke or wrote about this disorder. I began to google, but I myself did not know what to look. I am looking for a smell that I can’t even describe, it does not exist in nature. The meat smells like a dead with the smell of rubber, milk-some kind of sour stench. In general, I realized that the distortion of smells is called Parosmia, found a couple of articles on this subject and a group in Telegram, where the same as me are sitting. Anonymous Parosmians, ”she laughs.

Telegram chat “Covid-19 consequences”, which Nadezhda is talking about, has existed a little less than a year. Now there are 25 thousand participants. They are mainly divided by experiences. Some say that loved ones support them: they refuse to cook a disgusting smell of food; Other things have much worse - there is no understanding from relatives, it comes to divorces.

- We just need to speak out, because healthy people do not understand us. A person is not that he cannot cook, he is simply not able to go into the kitchen - everything stinks there.

You enter the porch, and it is already becoming bad, because you feel the smell of food. I can’t eat meat, milk, part of the vegetables, but I eat only greens, some fruits, salted fish and cereals, and that’s not all: from oatmeal - stink, from buckwheat - no, pasta - through time. I can't cook the third month. The husband has been eating all this time with a closed door so as not to worsen my condition once again. I have one more distortion - I constantly “hear” the smell of onions. I and people around smell like onions, ”says Nadezhda.

The severity of the disorder is different: from a thin unpleasant odor, which appears for no reason, to a painful stench that you feel from everywhere. Due to the stress caused by distortion of the sense of smell, and, as a result, loss of appetite, people and the general mental state are significantly deteriorating in people.

- I walked down the street, felt a strange smell from nowhere and ran away. I ate everything with a clamped nose. Or didn’t eat, ”Anastasia Glushkova suffered Koronavirus in April last year. The sense of smell began to return to it only in July, three months after the illness. And almost immediately - in a distorted form. - I did not go to the doctor: I did not know what to say, and which specialist to go to. I just endured this stink. Rotten with something sweet. Now I don’t feel this terrible smell, but I don’t feel some subtle aromas like the smell of frost or the smell of spring, ”she says.

Aliya Polydanova fell ill with coronavirus at the end of November 2020. She began Parosmia in February.

- I realized that it was she, when it began to seem to me that the meat had tasted like a rotten celery. Then the chicken, meat, eggs began to smell like that. She began to notice that I could not go into the kitchen. I immediately guessed that this was connected with coronavirus, turned to her Laura, but she could not help. I heard about the chat in Telegram, I began to read it. Many people simply do not believe: adolescents say that they are deceiving parents, so as not to eat soup; Pregnant women who also have steam, they say that this is ordinary toxicosis. But with toxicosis, the world does not smell of corpses. It is very annoyed that they don’t talk about it. On TV, they should explain: if everything stinks with you, you had a coronavirus. One day I could not eat anything, the stink went from everywhere: from food, from toothpaste, from cigarettes, from spirits, from people. My diet is always changing, but basically I eat cereal bars and a green apple. Every day I try to find what stops stinking for me. Yesterday I ate a half of boiled potatoes.

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Parosmia as a consequence of coronavirus today has been studied little. Researchers only collect data about it. From the stories of the ill ones, several general symptoms can be distinguished:

• A person feels a smell that resembles a mixture of many unpleasant aromas. At the same time, there may not be any source of unpleasant odor nearby.

• The smell of fried food is especially difficult.

• In most cases, an acute reaction is detected on protein products: meat, dairy, eggs. From vegetables, they are released: potatoes, onions, red pepper.

According to the head of the departure of the suberinolaryngology of the FMBA Federal Center for the Federal Center for Otorinolaryngology, the exact mechanism of the development of the steamy, as well as other smell disorders at Covid-19, is still unknown.

“There is evidence that the leading role is played by the defeat of the central nervous system and the specific structures of the brain - olfactory bulbs,” he says. - The most important thing: with a covid, the smell disorders - more often not steamy, but anosmia (complete loss of smell) and hyposimia (decrease in smell) - occur very often, are not always accompanied by a pronounced damage to the nasal mucosa and can remain for a long time, after the disappearance of other symptoms.

Melnikov notes that sometimes patients with steamer feel a wide range of distorted smells, and sometimes only one of them seems changed.

“One patient complained that only boiled beef smells of spirits,” the doctor says. - It happens that smells appear that the patient cannot describe. Often distortion is combined with the absence or decrease in odors from most objects. Parosmia often appears after the sense of smell begins to recover after a complete anosmia.

- How long can this disorder be maintained?

- The period of time is unknown. The average duration of the sense of smell in Covid is 8–9 days, but the violations and distortion of the sense of smell can last months and after the transferred Covid. This does not mean that violations will never disappear: cases of restoration of smell through years are known.

- How can you improve your condition during steaming? What are the ways to return the sense of smell?

- Unfortunately, there is no means of restoring smell with proven effectiveness. If the hyposmia discusses the possibility of “olfactory training”, then the process of restoring the perception of smells during steaming is absolutely spontaneous.

With very unpleasant and strong smells, you have to resort to sedative therapy.

- Is it true that steamers are predominantly prone to young people, and especially women?

-Yes, there is evidence that with Covid-19 in women Parosmia is more common than in men, although this does not mean that men do not have it. There is no reliable data on the dependence of the age, although earlier, to the pandemic, it was reported that Parosmia is more often found in the age group of 20–29 years.

A large number of studies about steamy are laid out on the British site ABSCENT, dedicated to the study of smell loss and other olfactory disorders. The charity organization that informs patients existed before the pandemic, but now its main thing is to help those who have encountered smell problems during or after Covid.

Vasilisa Osharin