One of the more notorious symptoms of COVID-19 is the loss of taste and smell. There are varying estimates on just how many tongues and noses went out of business, but one study shows that as many as 1.6 million Americans lost their senses. Now a new study from researchers at Columbia University and New York University Langone Health, published in the journal Cell, finds that the culprit of this olfactory dysfunction may be our immune response to COVID-19. The new insight may help our understanding of how to treat long COVID.
Previous research hypothesized that COVID-19 was infecting the receptors that send information about smell to the brain. “We took a close look at that and that definitely turned out not to be true,” says NYU Langone Health’s virologist Benjamin tenOever, one of the authors of the study. In tandem with researchers from Columbia University, who had studied autopsies of patients with COVID-19, tenOver conducted tests using hamsters to answer the question:…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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