About 14 years ago, Chrissy Kelly lost her sense of smell. He went to the Czech Republic to visit his family and caught a little virus. Months later, when she still couldn’t smell it, she tried to find answers by seeing doctors, including her general practitioner and an ear, nose and throat specialist.
He was diagnosed with anosmia (loss of smell) and, like many patients with the condition, was told he had to learn to live with it. But for him, the loss was catastrophic. “After about six months of total loss, I was just climbing walls and I just didn’t feel like myself anymore,” she says.
Researchers speculate that up to 22 percent of the population lives with smell disordersfor example, hyposmia (partial loss of smell) or anosmia (complete loss of smell). And many live with olfactory disorders such as phantosmia or parosmia, where a person perceives imaginary odors, where smells that are usually pleasant, such as coffee or shampoo, begin to register as very unpleasant (like feces or vomit). However, the conditions are poorly understood, underdiagnosed, and often underestimated by clinicians.
The pandemic changed that. Covid has brought unprecedented attention and research interest sense of smell. There was 780 million cases have been reported According to the World Health Organization, as of December 2019, Covid-19 (and many more unreported) and loss of smell is a common symptom. In a 2023 survey published in the journal Laryngoscope60 percent of individuals with Covid experienced a loss of smell, most temporarily but some for a longer period of time.
When Covid caused millions of noses worldwide to malfunction almost simultaneously, the virus spurred new discoveries and research in this critical sense. As scientists learn more about how the sense of smell works, evidence is mounting that smell is deeply connected not only to quality of life, but also to brain health.
