2023-11-25 08:31:00
A new study has shown that a new treatment may help restore the normal senses of smell and taste in people who have suffered from the “Covid-19” virus and who have not responded to other treatments.
Changes or complete loss of the sense of taste and smell are a common symptom of Covid-19, which has affected regarding half of those infected with the new coronavirus. Most of the time, these symptoms disappear following four weeks, but for some people it may take months, according to the website Medical News Today.
For some people with long Covid, abnormalities in the senses of smell and taste – called parosmia associated with Covid-19 – can last much longer. Although the condition is not life-threatening, experts say their quality of life is affected.
In the new research, which is being presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, doctors targeted a group of nerves in the neck called the stellate ganglion. The treatment involves delivering a stellate ganglion block that involves injecting an anesthetic into the nerve cluster to stimulate the sympathetic nervous system, a technique that has been used to try to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cluster headaches and some rare diseases.
This is the first time that this treatment has been used to treat the symptoms of “long Covid”.
The study included a group of 54 people who were resistant to other conventional drug and medical treatments for parosmia. Among them, 37 participants were followed up, and 22 of them reported improvement in their symptoms following a week of treatment. In addition, most of these participants reported significant additional improvement following a month of treatment.
After three months, the researchers reported that there was an average improvement of 49 percent in these symptoms among the group, and 86 percent of those who responded to the first injection had additional improvements following a second injection given to the other side of the neck six weeks later.
However, if someone did not respond to the first injection, the second injection did not affect him either, and this means that the treatment may not benefit everyone.
Dr. Nathan Gooder, a specialist in integrative medicine and medical director of Brio-Medical, who was not involved in the study, said that “the future is promising in this topic and that the early results are very promising.”
However, there are limitations to this treatment. Godier noted that one of the problems is that not all patients have a stellate ganglion that doctors can block, as “the stellate ganglion is found in only 80 percent of individuals, and this is what prevents the dissemination and generalization of this treatment.”
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