Snort children who are infected with COVID-19 and have lost their sense of smell

Orange. eucalyptus. lavender. peppermint.

Doctors at Corona Children’s Hospital and Seattle Children’s Hospital use such scents to treat children who have lost their sense of smell with COVID-19. Parents go to the clinic and return home with a set of essential oils for their child to sniff twice a day for three months. Clinicians check the progress every month.

The Colorado Children’s Hospital Odor Clinic has been approved to open on March 10. So far, five children have been screened and one has been enrolled. Seattle Children’s will launch the program this spring.

This treatment, known as “olfactory training,” has been clinically proven to be effective in adults. However, according to clinicians, there is virtually no data on whether this method works for children.

Children are much less likely to develop COVID or suffer from the consequences than adults, but the number of pediatric patients is steadily increasing. More cases mean that more children have a prolonged symptom known as “long COVID”. Among these complaints is the loss of odor.

The link between coronavirus infection and adult olfactory dysfunction is well documented in both short-term ill patients and so-called long-haul carriers. However, scientists are still uncertain about how many people will develop this complication and how the virus causes it. Various research teams have found clues that can explain this phenomenon. inflammation And Structural confusion Supports cells involved in olfactory function.

However, Dr. John McCrae, MD, a pediatric otolaryngologist in Frisco, Texas, said few studies focused on children’s olfaction disorders, not to mention those caused by COVID. That’s because children rarely cause these problems, and the new coronavirus was just that, and new.

“Everything is very new,” said McRae, who is also the chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics Board of Education on otolaryngology. “You really can’t put a hat on something.”

It works for adults. Does it work for children?

One intervention for adults who lose their sense of smell as a result of neuropathy such as Alzheimer’s disease, tumors that block nasal airflow, or any number of viruses, including COVID, was olfactory training.

It generally works as follows: Doctor test The patient’s sense of smell to establish a baseline. Adults are then given a set of essential oils with specific scents and instructions on how to train their nose at home. Patients usually sniff each oil twice daily for weeks or months. At the end of the training, the doctor will retest them to determine if they have improved.

Yolanda Holler-Managan, MD, a pediatric neurologist and assistant professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said he didn’t understand why this method didn’t work for children either. In both age groups, the olfactory nerve can regenerate every 6-8 weeks. As your nerves heal, training helps strengthen your sense of smell.

“It’s like helping your muscles get stronger again,” she said.

When doctors began discovering COVID’s adult olfactory and taste problems late last spring, pediatric ear, nose, and throat specialist Kenny Chan, who oversees the new Colorado clinic, said this was a child. I realized that it could be a problem for me as well.

Dr. Kathleen Sea, MD, head of otolaryngology head and neck surgery at Seattle Children’s Hospital, noticed the problem when he received an email from someone at a local emergency medical center. After reading the message, Shi called Chan and talked about it. The conversation became a snowball at the forefront of her facility’s scent training clinic.

Both clinicians need to tackle the challenges that “smell training” can pose to children. For beginners, some young patients may not know how to identify a particular scent (for example, spices such as cloves) used in adult tests. This is because they are too young and there is no standard framework.

As a workaround, Chan used some scents instead of the more recognizable scents.

It is also difficult to find a child who is experiencing an olfactory disorder. Many people with COVID are asymptomatic, and others may be too young to verbally describe what they are experiencing or to recognize what is missing.

Nonetheless, McRae said the potential benefits of simple treatment outweigh the costs and challenges of setting it up for children. Adult scent training kits sell for less than $ 50.

“There is no data that this does anything,” Chan said. “But if no one cares about this question, this question won’t be solved.”

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. This is an editorial independent program. Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation It is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.