Neuroscience & Neurological Disorders

Biography

Biography: Rashika Gupta

Abstract

SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus of novel pneumonia (COVID-19) with high ACE2 receptor affinity binding is the primary cause of the current global pandemic declared by WHO. As mentioned on March 16th 2020, that "we cannot fight a fire blindfolded and countries should test every suspected COVID-19 case". Hence, comes the need for rapid testing at large as 219, 611 deaths have been reported till April 29th, 2020 and calls for the further lack of isolation to stop the spread of community transmission. Also, some COVID-19 patients have strokes, seizures, confusion, and brain inflammation and lose their sense of smell. (Wadman, Frankel, Kaiser, Matacic, 2020). A neurological perspective here is that the sense of smell is an olfactory receptor response which initiates impulses in the olfactory neuron. (Hoover, 2010) . Odorants such as smoked salmon, lemon, strawberry, clove etc. can be used daily by the citizens of every country and may detect the damage in the olfactory pathway if practised at a stretch for 14 days. (Hudry, Thobois, Broussolle, Adeleine & Royet, 2003) Some day, if a citizen cannot smell the odorant involuntarily, then it is time for the citizen to visit a doctor for nasal congestion and get checked immediately. It may be marked as the onset of the symptoms of COVID-19 in them, and hence early detection with other testing methods can fast track the process, reducing the mortality rate. The limitation to this approach is in the case of neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease (PD) where patients have a significant deficit for all cognitive tasks of olfactory judgement and hence cannot be tested or self-administered at home. (Hudry, Thobois, Broussolle, Adeleine & Royet, 2003)