After the loss of taste and smell, some people affected by Covid-19 find themselves smelling unusual odors: trash cans that smell of blood, a fruit that tastes like another. This phenomenon is called parosmia. La Dépêche tells you more.
Impossible to wear your perfume again because the smell disgusts you, or to eat your favorite food because the taste makes you nauseous, since you had Covid-19? This phenomenon is called parosmia. This symptom is quite simply a distortion of one odor towards another odor, generally unpleasant following anosmia (loss of taste and smell). And it affects many patients who have contracted Covid.
“No matter what kind of unpleasant smell, it will smell like blood to me”
“I can’t drink coca cola since I had the Covid because it makes me want to throw up even though I love it!” Complains Mathilde Guenault, who has been living with parosmia for three months already … Du next to Eva, freelance in Toulouse, after 4 months of loss of smell, she now finds herself smelling the most … atypical smells. “When I’m next to something that smells bad, like trash cans, it’s not the smell you know anymore, I smell blood actually. Whatever type of bad smell it does. will smell blood for me. Besides that, I can no longer wear my perfume because I hate its smell, “testifies the young woman.
For some, this phenomenon has been going on for a year already. So much so that the government would try to include anosmia (and therefore parosmia) in the list of long-lasting ailments.
After a month and a half of tasting nothing then three weeks when everything seemed to be back to normal, I found myself tasting and feeling the putrid in everything I have been eating for 2 days, an excessively unpleasant phenomenon called the #parosmie.
WEAR YOUR MASKS.#COVID19
– Raphaël B. Leclerc (@rbleclerc) December 1, 2020
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“Above all, do not worry”
According to doctor Antoine Le Roy, ENT at the La Croix du Sud clinic in Quint-Fonsegrive, parosmia is a very good sign. “It means that we are recovering. That we are on the road to recovery. Above all, we must not worry in any case, even if it is a very unpleasant feeling.”
Very common in patients who have lost taste and smell as a result of a viral infection (such as Covid-19), your natural sense of smell and taste can recover quickly, “but some patients take two years to fully recover. recover.” Others, unfortunately, will never find it. “But it’s on a case-by-case basis.” There is no generality in these phenomena linked to taste and smell. The ENT has, however, found that people who had suffered this loss and the change in their sense of smell and taste due to Covid, recovered faster than those affected by other post-viral anosmias.
As unpleasant as it is, therefore, parosmia is neither dangerous nor worrying, only terribly disabling. What solutions then? Dr Antoine Le Roy recommends olfactory rehabilitation to relearn the brain to identify the smells that correspond to what we smell, “but above all, it is waiting. The only real treatment is time.”
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