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In her quest to overcome one of COVID-19’s strangest symptoms, Mariana Castro-Salzman was willing to try anything.
The 32-year-old visited an oncologist and got a CT scan of her head. She saw an ear, nose and throat doctor. Took steroids. Went to a neurologist who put her on anti-anxiety medication.
She began sniffing essential oils every day. A homeopath prescribed bath flowers, supplements and chaga mushrooms.
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And yet, nearly a year after recovering from the coronavirus, her senses of smell and taste
are still scrambled. Onions and garlic evoke a nausea that has nothing to do with their actual scent. Coffee smells like a burned tire, but worse.
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Early last year, Angela Reiersen, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis, took ill with what she suspected was COVID-19. Because of a shortage of tests at the time, she never found out for sure, and she recovered before long. But the experience got her thinking about something.
Reiersen had recently seen research suggesting that an antidepressant called fluvoxamine was useful in treating sepsis, a potentially fatal condition in which the body releases a dangerous imbalance of chemicals known as cytokines into the bloodstream in response to an infection.
Might fluvoxamine also be effective in treating COVID-19?
On March 25, Reiersen sent an email to a colleague, Eric Lenze, also a psychiatrist, asking what he thought of her idea. Lenze was equally intrigued.