TT/UNT 28 AUGUSTI 2021 skrev:Covid-19 har drastiskt förändrat patientunderlaget, men också gjort att fler fått upp ögonen vikten av att ha ett fungerande luktsinne. I september öppnar landets första luktmottagning. Johan Lundström säger att det finns ett skriande behov av behandling.

– Man beräknar att ungefär 300 000 svenskar kommer att ha nedsatt luktsinne efter covid-19.

– Ett problem som är relativt omedelbart är att man tappar aptiten, för mycket av aptitretningen kommer via lukten. Initialt upplever det flesta att de tappar ganska mycket i vikt, berättar Johan Lundström.

Senare blir problemet det motsatta. Personer som förlorat luktsinnet kompenserar ofta med mer socker, salt och fett för att få någon sorts tillfredsställelse när de äter.

– Vi ser att överlag går personer som tappar luktsinnet upp i vikt och blir ganska tjocka. Det ser man väldigt tydligt och det har vi vetat om i flera år.

Fakta: Luktsinnet
Luktsinnet fungerar redan hos tolv veckor gamla foster. Det är genom det barn utvecklar preferenser för viss sorts mat. De präglas på det mamman äter under graviditeten.

Spoiler: visa

Det finns olika typer av luktnedsättningar. Anosmi innebär att man helt förlorat luktsinnet och hyposmi innebär att man har nedsatt förmåga att känna lukter. Parosmi är en förvrängning av luktsinnet så att saker som tidigare luktat gott upplevs ha en obehaglig doft.

Mellan 50 och 70 procent av personer med konstaterad covid-19 har minskad förmåga att känna lukter. De allra flesta återfår luktsinnet efter några veckor, men en del får bestående besvär. Om man inte återfått luktsinnet efter två, tre månader bör man söka läkare.

Källa: TT, Perceptual Neuroscience Lab

The Guardian Opinion 12 Jan 2022 skrev:My wife, Heidi, took her own life after a 13-month battle with long Covid that started as a mostly asymptomatic coronavirus infection. Long Covid took her from one of the healthiest, most vibrant people I’ve ever known to a person so debilitated that she could not bear another day on this planet.
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Spoiler: visa

Late last night I got a desperate Twitter message from a man whose wife could be the next Heidi. She has long Covid and was threatening to end her life. She had already told their eight-year-old daughter her plan. I called him immediately. Heidi and his wife both suffered from unexplained neurological tremors and internal chest cavity vibrations so bad they lost the ability to sleep.

Like prisoners of war kept awake for days as a method of torture, their minds lost the ability to make sound cognitive decisions. I knew this man’s terror. Sadly, his call was not an anomaly. I have answered requests like his every single day since my wife’s obituary went viral and I began to share our story with the media.
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Three weeks before she died, we were already terrified that she would die – not by her own hand, but from a stroke or a heart attack.
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Heidi also suffered from ongoing gastrointestinal issues, exhaustion from just walking up a single flight of stairs, extreme body aches, brain fog and a host of other ailments. All of this – with no hope on the horizon of any cure let alone acknowledgment from the medical world – brought her to the place where she asked me that, if something happened to her, I would tell the world what long Covid is. I made this promise never thinking I would actually have to act on it – never imagining that only three weeks later I would come home to find that she had decided death was preferable to another minute in her own personal hell.
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My wife was an avid 90-minute-a-day walker, ate only organic (and mostly vegan) food, and hadn’t had an alcoholic drink in three and half years. Within six weeks of noticing “Covid toes” and some gastrointestinal issues she could barely walk from excruciating nerve pain in her feet so extreme as to mimic advanced diabetic neuropathy.

Long Covid doesn’t come for you all at once; instead, with methodical precision, it slowly robs you. Heidi lost her mobility and her ability to eat. She was a lifelong avid reader but the brain fog (better thought of as cognitive dysfunction) robbed her of the ability to retain information. Even urinating and eventually, and cruelly, sex became painful. Long Covid seemed to steal every part of her life that made it worth living.

When I told him, “She wasn’t depressed, it was long Covid,” he looked at me with bewilderment and asked, “What’s long Covid?”

We will never have an accurate count of global infections, but preliminary research suggests that at least one in three people who get Covid will develop long Covid symptoms.