Psychophysical Olfactory Tests and Detection of COVID-19 in Patients With Sudden Onset Olfactory Dysfunction: A Prospective Study

  1. Jerome R. Lechien
  2. Pierre Cabaraux
  3. Carlos M. Chiesa-Estomba
  4. Mohamad Khalife
  5. Jan Plzak
  6. Stéphane Hans
  7. Delphine Martiny
  8. Christian Calvo-Henriquez
  9. Maria R. Barillari
  10. Claire Hopkins
  11. Sven Saussez

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Abstract

To investigate the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) status of patients with initial sudden olfactory anosmia (ISOA) through nasopharyngeal swabs for reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) analysis and to explore their olfactory dysfunctions with psychophysical olfactory evaluation.

Methods:

A total of 78 ISOA patients were recruited from April 6, 2020, to April 10, 2020, through a public call of University of Mons (Mons, Belgium). Patients benefited from nasopharyngeal swabs and fulfilled the patient-reported outcome questionnaire. Among them, 46 patients performed psychophysical olfactory evaluation using olfactory identification testing. Based on the duration of the ISOA, 2 groups of patients were compared: patients with olfactory dysfunction duration ≤12 days (group 1) and those with duration >12 days (group 2).

Results:

In group 1, 42 patients (87.5%) had a positive viral load determined by RT-PCR and 6 patients (12.5%) were negative. In group 2, 7 patients (23%) had a positive viral load and 23 patients (77%) were negative. The psychophysical olfactory evaluation reported that anosmia and hyposmia occurred in 24 (52%) and 11 (24%) patients, respectively. Eleven patients were normosmic. The viral load was significantly higher in patients of group 1 compared with those of group 2.

Conclusions:

Coronavirus disease 2019 was detected in a high proportion of ISOA patients, especially over the first 12 days of olfactory dysfunction. Anosmia is an important symptom to consider in the detection of COVID-19 infection.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.15.20066472: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: The ethics committee of Jules Bordet Institute approved the study protocol (IJB-0M0113137).
    Consent: Patients were invited to participate and the informed consent was obtained.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Viral RNA extraction was performed by m2000 mSample Preparation SystemDNA Kit (Abbott) using 1000µl manually lysed sample (700µl sample + 800µl lysis buffer from kit) eluted in 90µl elution buffer.
    Abbott
    suggested: (Abbott, RRID:SCR_010477)
    Statistical Analyses: Statistical analyses were performed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences for Windows (SPSS version 22,0; IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA).
    Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1177/0145561320929169
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.15.20066472v1 on medRxiv