COLUMBUS – Would you rather have piece of candy or a cotton swab up the nose?
The choice of COVID-19 tests may never come to that but a team of researchers at Ohio State are working to determine if smelling and eating hard candy is a reliable test for the coronavirus is people who are not exhibiting symptoms.
While symptoms like fever, chills, a cough and body aches vary widely among patients, an estimated 86% of people who test positive report a loss of smell, “which makes it a much better predictor, especially if it’s sudden loss,” said Christopher Simons, an associate professor of food science and technology at Ohio State and co-leader of a team of scientists who have gotten $305,000 from National Institutes of Health to develop techniques for detecting potential COVID-19 sufferers.
In the first phase of the research, the effectiveness of candy will be compared to that of established methods of assessing an individual’s sense of smell, such as scratch-and-sniff cards.
In the second, long-term phase, the team will follow 2,800 people for 90 days, mostly Ohio State students, as they eat candy daily and log the taste and smell.
Eight flavors of hard candies that look alike will be manufactured and the subjects will eat one piece per day and log into an app to report what they smell and taste, not only by identifying the flavor, but also rating its intensity. If they report a sudden drop in either sense, they’ll receive a message that they should quarantine and get a COVID-19 test.
The researchers say this method allows for sophisticated assessment of the function of two routes – via the nose and the back of the throat – by which our sense of smell helps tell us what we’re eating, Simons said.