Metrics details. A Correction to this article was published on 26 July We aimed to identify subject characteristics, symptom associations, and antibody response intensity associated with taste or smell disorders. We used data from SAPRIS, a study based on a consortium of five prospective cohorts gathering , participants in the French general population. The relationship between age and taste or smell disorders was non-linear.
Among patients with a positive ELISA-Spike test, women, smokers and people drinking more than 2 drinks a day were more likely to develop taste or smell disorders. This symptom was strongly associated with an antibody response. The overwhelming majority of patients with taste or smell disorders experienced a wide variety of symptoms.
Peer Review reports. Symptoms of COVID are commonly cough, fever, dyspnea, myalgia, headache, arthralgia and diarrhea [ 1 , 2 ]. The spread of the epidemic highlighted a new disease presentation: patients with taste or smell disorders TSD. There is no consensus in the literature about patient characteristics associated with this symptom [ 4 , 5 ]. There remain many unanswered questions about the relationships between antibody response intensity and TSD and their association with other COVID symptoms.
Although long-term data in the general population are still scarce, it appears that TSD may be persistent over time in some patients [ 6 ]. Our main goals were to identify subject characteristics associated with TSD, to investigate the relationship between TSD and antibody response intensity and to characterize symptom associations for subjects with or without TSD.
All participants were invited to respond to two electronic self-administered questionnaires. Questionnaires were sent as of April 1, and returned before May 27, , thus they covered the lockdown and post lockdown period in France, the first lockdown occurred between March 17, and May 11, In this analysis, we selected participants who had been presumably infected by SARS-CoV-2 based on serological results, i.
