Below please find a summary and link(s) of new coronavirus-related content published today in Annals of Internal Medicine. The summary below is not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. A collection of coronavirus-related content is free to the public at http://go.annals.org/coronavirus.
1. Loss of Smell and Taste in 2013 European Patients With Mild to Moderate COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has spread worldwide rapidly. Commonly reported symptoms, such as fever, cough, dyspnea, fatigue, and myalgia, are nonspecific, and the lack of testing in some European countries may make the diagnosis of COVID-19 challenging. However, two distinctive symptoms were identified recently: loss of smell and loss of taste. The authors from University of Mons; Mons, Belgium and Université Libre de Bruxelles; Brussels, Belgium used a standardized online questionnaire to collect clinical and epidemiologic data from 2,153 consecutive hospitalized and ambulatory patients in 18 European hospitals with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 to evaluate the prevalence and features of, as well as recovery from, smell dysfunction. The authors found that the prevalence of self-reported smell and taste dysfunction is higher than previously reported and may be characterized by different clinical forms. Their results suggest that anosmia may not be related to nasal obstruction or inflammation. Read the full text: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2428.
Media contacts: A PDF for this article is not yet available. Please click the link to read full text. The lead author, Jerome R. Lechien, MD, PhD, MS, can be reached at Jerome.Lechien@umons.ac.be.
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Journal
Annals of Internal Medicine