An edifying study reveals the ailment suffered by tens of millions of people around the world.
the covid continues on its way. For two and a half years, the coronavirus turns our lives upside down. And saw the 7th wave carried by the variant BA.5I’epidemic is not finished yet.
A sickness which continues to unfold. Of new symptoms are regularly discovered or confirmed by scientists around the world who have pinpointed a new phenomenon caused by theinfection.
We already knew that the BA.5 variant had sounded the return of the loss of thesmell and tastewhich seemed to have disappeared with the first versions ofOmicron. We also knew that the Coronavirus could take a long form with what is now called the long covid. We now know that millions of people suffer from smell and taste disorders at least 6 months after being tested positive.
According to a study published on July 27 on The BMJ, The British Journal of Medicine (the British Journal of Medicine), 5% of adults develop long-term smell or taste problems. A study conducted by a team of Italian researchers who analyzed 18 different publications on the subject, bringing together 3,698 patients in total.
According to the figures revealed, 5.6% of patients would suffer from smell disorders (anosmia), and 4.4% would suffer from taste disorders (ageusia) at least 6 months after infection. Knowing that 550 million contamination have been recorded worldwide since the beginning of the epidemic, this means that 15 million people suffer from smell problems, and 12 million from taste problems.
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27 months
Professor Danny Altmann, professor of immunology at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research, said in the columns of the Guardian : “This is a strong and important study, once again alerting us to the difficulties inherent in mapping the extent of long-term damage caused by Covid-19. The authors conducted a meta-analysis fairly rigorous across multiple cohorts, modeling taste and smell recovery time. Needless to say, taste and smell problems are not insignificant to quality of life. Studies like this alert us on the hidden burden of people with persistent symptoms but may not have thought it worth contacting the GP assuming there was not much they could do”.
Indeed, the smell of coffee or food can for example become downright unbearable, according to several testimonies.
It should be noted that while women have more difficulty regaining all of their taste or olfactory abilities, one of them only regained her sense of smell… 27 months after her infection ! That is more than two years.