Phantom smells: a prevalent COVID-19 symptom that progressively sets in

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

One of the long-term symptoms of COVID-19 is phantosmia, a type of Olfactory Disorder (OD) that has deleterious impacts on patients’ quality of life. The aim of this article was to study how this poorly understood qualitative OD manifests itself in the COVID-19.

Methods

4691 patients with COVID-19 responded to our online questionnaire focusing on COVID-19-related OD. We first analyzed the prevalence of phantosmia in this population. Then, with the help of Natural Language Processing techniques, we investigated the qualitative descriptions of phantom smells by the 1723 respondents who reported phantosmia.

Results

The prevalence of phantosmia was of 37%. Women were more likely to report phantosmia than men, as well as respondents for whom OD was described a

SUBMITTER: Bousquet C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9521006 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature