Assessment of COVID-19-related olfactory dysfunction and its association with psychological, neuropsychiatric, and cognitive symptoms

Purpose of reviewTo provide a detailed overview of the assessment of COVID-19-related olfactory dysfunction and its association with psychological, neuropsychiatric, and cognitive symptoms.Recent findingsCOVID-19-related olfactory dysfunction can have a detrimental impact to the quality of life of patients. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, olfactory and taste disorders were a common but under-rated, under-researched and under-treated sensory loss. The pandemic has exacerbated the current unmet need for accessing good healthcare for patients living with olfactory disorders and other symptoms secondary to COVID-19. This review thus explores the associations that COVID-19 has with psychological, neuropsychiatric, and cognitive symptoms, and provide a framework and rationale for the assessment of patients presenting with COVID-19 olfactory dysfunction.SummaryAcute COVID-19 infection and long COVID is not solely a disease of the respiratory and vascular systems. These two conditions have strong associations with psychological, neuropsychiatric, and cognitive symptoms. A systematic approach with history taking and examination particularly with nasal endoscopy can determine the impact that this has on the patient. Specific olfactory disorder questionnaires can demonstrate the impact on quality of life, while psychophysical testing can objectively assess and monitor olfaction over time. The role of cross-sectional imaging is not yet described for COVID-19-related olfactory dysfunction. Management options are limited to conservative adjunctive measures, with some medical therapies described

Socializing One Health: an innovative strategy to investigate social and behavioral risks of emerging viral threats

In an effort to strengthen global capacity to prevent, detect, and control infectious diseases in animals and people, the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT project funded development of regional, national, and local One Health capacities for early disease detection, rapid response, disease control, and risk reduction. From the outset, the EPT approach was inclusive of social science research methods designed to understand the contexts and behaviors of communities living and working at human-animal-environment interfaces considered high-risk for virus emergence. Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, PREDICT behavioral research aimed to identify and assess a range of socio-cultural behaviors that could be influential in zoonotic disease emergence, amplification, and transmission. This broad approach to behavioral risk characterization enabled us to identify and characterize human activities that could be linked to the transmission dynamics of new and emerging viruses. This paper provides a discussion of implementation of a social science approach within a zoonotic surveillance framework. We conducted in-depth ethnographic interviews and focus groups to better understand the individual- and community-level knowledge, attitudes, and practices that potentially put participants at risk for zoonotic disease transmission from the animals they live and work with, across 6 interface domains. When we asked highly-exposed individuals (ie. bushmeat hunters, wildlife or guano farmers) about the risk they perceived in their occupational activities, most did not perceive it to be risky, whether because it was normalized by years (or generations) of doing such an activity, or due to lack of information about potential risks. Integrating the social sciences allows investigations of the specific human activities that are hypothesized to drive disease emergence, amplification, and transmission, in order to better substantiate behavioral disease drivers, along with the social dimensions of infection and transmission dynamics. Understanding these dynamics is critical to achieving health security--the protection from threats to health-- which requires investments in both collective and individual health security. Involving behavioral sciences into zoonotic disease surveillance allowed us to push toward fuller community integration and engagement and toward dialogue and implementation of recommendations for disease prevention and improved health security

Uterine and tubal anatomical abnormalities in infertile women: diagnosis with routine hysterosalpingography prior to selective laparoscopy

Objective: To assess the findings and usefulness of hysterosalpingography as a routine investigation in the fertility workup prior to selective laparoscopy. Design: Descriptive retrospective study. Setting: A university hospital in the north of Jordan. Subjects: All hysterosalpingographies performed in the period between 1st January and 31 December 2008. Outcome measures: Detection of uterine and fallopian tube abnormalities and their correlation with laparoscopic findings. Results: During the study period, 281 infertile women underwent hysterosalpingography with no post procedural complications. The mean (SD) age was 31.5 (5.91) years. Mean (SD) duration of infertility was 4 (3.44) years. Infertility was reported as primary and secondary by 119 (42.3 %) and 162 (57.6 %), respectively. Altogether 281 patients and 562 tubes were examined. Of those, 402 were patent and 160 occluded. There was only one woman in whom peritubal adhesions were diagnosed. Because of hysterosalpingographically diagnosed tubal occlusion, 46 women (16.4 %) were referred for laparoscopy. Eight (17.3%) of them were treated with unilateral salpingectomy and 28 (60.8%) with bilateral salpingectomy. Salpingolysis was performed for 7 (15.2%) women, and 3 (6.7%) women had untreatable adhesions. The concordance was 71.7%. The sensitivity of HSG was 80%, the specificity 50%, the negative predictive value 61% and the positive predictive value 71%. Of the total of 281 women, 30 (10.7%) conceived within 1 - 11 months after the hysterosalpingography. Conclusions: The very high abnormal predictive value of hysterosalpingography in the diagnosis of tubal occlusion suggests that this procedure could be performed as a screening examination