Relation

Anosmia in relation to COVID-19

  • Anosmia is a result of congestion or the presence of edema in the nasal area
  • When volunteers were vaccinated with a strain of the coronavirus, they experience nasal obstruction
  • Due to infection, inflammation was presented in olfactory tissue. This then resulted in edema and rhinorrhea
  • Further study on the nasal tissue found that there was a diminished cilia count and less olfactory neurons present (which could be an indicator of the inability to smell)
  • Unlike the use of ACE2 in COVID-19 for the virus to bind to receptors on cells, the inoculation strain (HCoV-229E) uses aminopeptidase N
  • Those with COVID-19 showed that the presence of increased amounts of ACE2 resulted in damaged cilia and goblet cells in the nasal tissue
  • In a survey done on patients with anosmia in South Korea, it was found that 30% of them had anosmia
  • Out of 214 patients in Wuhan, 11 of them had anosmia
  • An inoculation of a different strain of the coronavirus in mice through the nasal cavity showed that the virus could be detected in the olfactory bulb after 3 days
  • Cytokines were present in the olfactory bulb
  • COVID-19 could eventually spread to the blood-brain barrier would disrupt homeostasis in the brain, negatively impacting the olfactory area

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Updated 2020-08-03

Tags

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)

Biomedical Sciences