Lost your smell during a bout of COVID? Ontario researchers are working to reverse that

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Researchers at St. Joseph’s Health Care London are working on a treatment for people that lost their sense of smell during a bout of COVID.

Loss of sense of smell and taste is a common symptom of COVID-19. It can also be accompanied by parosmia, a disorder that turns normal odours into a stench.

Rebecca Bruzzese suffered from parosmia after a bout of COVID, “Coffee was the worst,” she said. “It smelled like hot garbage.”

The smell of many foods was so bad for Bruzzese that she lost 30 pounds.

The disorder can also be accompanied by phantom smells, with Bruzzese regularly believing she was smelling natural gas, or cigarette smoke, “Not having a reliable sense of smell was very disorienting and anxiety provoking,” said Bruzzese. “The natural gas smell was the worst. I live in a condo and would contact the building manager to investigate. I was borderline neurotic for a couple of months.”

A treatment being trialed at St. Joseph’s Health Care London (St. Joseph’s) was a game changer for Bruzzese.

The treatment, pioneered by Dr. Leigh Sowerby, a surgeon with the Otolaryngology- Head and Neck Program and scientist with Lawson Health Research Institute is a procedure involving injecting a local anesthetic into the stellate ganglion, a collection of nerves in the neck.

Early research by the team indicated that temporarily blocking the sympathetic signals, passed to the head, neck, arms, and chest by the stellate ganglion could help patients struggling with a distorted sense of smell.

The research resulted in a clinical trial with 44 patients

“The assumption for a lot of these patients is that there is nothing we can do,” explained Sowerby. “If the findings are positive, we’re hoping it will help advocate for more access to the procedure.”

The current study is a double-blind, with some recipients receiving placebo treatment. Investigators and patients do not know which they’ve received.

Bruzzese came down with COVID-19 in February 2023, and received her injection at the end of March. “Within two weeks I was mostly recovered. What Dr. Sowerby is doing is incredibly important. Being able to recognize smells is something we take for granted, until you can’t.”