
One of the hallmarks of a COVID-19 infection has been a lost sense of smell after the infection ends. In a new study, researchers blame an ongoing immune assault on the olfactory nerve cells — cells found at the top of the nasal cavity — and a decline in the number of those cells. The study was led by a team at Duke Health in Durham, N.C. “One of the first symptoms that has typically been associated with COVID-19 infection is loss of smell,” said senior study author Dr. Bradley Goldstein, associate professor of head and neck surgery at Duke. “Fortunately, many people who have an altered sense of smell during the acute phase of viral infection will recover smell within the next one to two weeks, but some do not,” Goldstein said in a university news release. “We need to better understand why this subset of people will go on to have persistent smell loss for months to years after being infected with SARS-CoV-2,” he added. For the study, researchers from Duke, Harvard Medical School in Boston and the University of California, San Diego, analyzed olfactory tissue samples from 24 biopsies, including nine patients with long-term loss of smell after COVID-19. This approach — paired with sophisticated single-cell analyses in collaboration with Dr. Sandeep Datta at Harvard — revealed a widespread inflammatory response in… read on > read on >