Development of restrictive eating disorders in children and adolescents with long-COVID-associated smell and taste dysfunction 2022 Brasseler et al

Background: Absent or abnormal senses of smell and taste have been frequently reported during both acute and long COVID in adult patients. In contrast, pediatric patients who test positive for SARS-CoV-2 are often asymptomatic and the loss of smell and/or taste has been infrequently reported. After observing several young patients with COVID-associated anosmia and ageusia at our clinic, we decided to investigate the incidence of subsequent eating disorders in these patients and in SARS-CoV-2 positive patients who did not experience anosmia and ageusia during the same period.

Material and methods: A single-site retrospective cohort study of 84 pediatric patients with suspected long COVID who were treated in the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Outpatient Clinic at the University Hospital Essen were evaluated for persistent symptoms of COVID-19. Smell and taste dysfunction as well as eating behaviors were among the signs and symptoms analyzed in this study.

Results: 24 out of 84 children and adolescents described smell and taste dysfunction after confirmed or suspected SARS-CoV-2 infections. A large number of these patients (6 out of 24) demonstrated increased fixation on their eating behavior post-COVID and over time these patients developed anorexia nervosa.

Discussion/Conclusion: In this study we saw a possible association of long-lasting post-COVID smell and taste dysfunction with subsequent development of eating disorders. This observation is worrisome and merits further investigation by healthcare providers at multiple clinical sites.

Open access, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2022.1022669/full

 

Only read the abstract but wondered if they distinguished issues caused by presumed neurological damage to the sense of smell and/or taste pathways during the acute phase (for example a relative made an almost complete recovery from acute Covid in April 2000, but still had an impaired sense of smell two years later) from issues potentially arising from Long Covid that presents as ME/CFS, namely food intolerances and hypersensitivity to various stimuli including smell.

 

Can't see how this counts as an eating disorder when eating disorders are considered abnormal behavior.

It's very normal behavior when you can no longer taste or smell to eat differently. Way too often medical research feels like it's written by alien robots who have no understanding of what organic life is.

Of course it goes to the definition of abnormal: abnormal to whom? To the patient it's very normal, nothing tastes like it should. It's only to the psychiatrist that it can be considered abnormal, but then that's a property of the psychiatrist, not the patient or the behavior. The whole medical language needs to be turned away from physician-first language, it distorts everything.

 

My mother has had anosmia since her youth, after a bad bout of an undetermined infection. She shows very little interest for food and she says that she would not mind eating the same foods everyday. That is not the case at home because my father cooks for both of them, but she often does so when she has lunch at her work canteen.

 

"Five of the 6 patients with restrictive eating behaviour reported a reduced appetite."
It has always been my understanding that people with anorexia nervosa experience hunger and have an appetite. (https://www.therecoveryvillage.com/mental-health/anorexia/history-of-anorexia/)

 

I'm skeptical here. I bet the psychiatrist applied the definition of anorexia very liberally. Mental healthcare is not always rigorous. I've been misdiagnosed with three mental disorders due to my ME: ADHD because I have trouble paying attention, generalized anxiety disorder because sometimes PEM used to make me feel jittery, and somatic symptom disorder because...Honestly? I think he was just trying to help me get disability.