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Comment by emersonrsantos | Hacker News Reader

Your symptoms are the same of people with untreated nasal polyps. Ask your doctor about nasal corticosteroid spray treatment.

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I see that listed as causing a decreased sense of smell - can it also cause a hypersensitivity to odors? My sense of smell is very precise, to the point that I can do things like smell which friends my girlfriend visiting on the way home from work. It could be in part because I maintain such a pristine, scent free environment where as other people have environments flooded with fragrances. This started it about the same time as my autoimmune disease and has steadily gotten worse at the same rate.

Upon exposure to an odor like Pantene or Gain, my upper lip feels numb and I start salivating. It makes me feel slightly dizzy and gives me a headache. The odor lingers in my nose and mouth until I rinse it out or 10-30 minutes. I was diagnosed with an esophageal hypersensitivity and dozens of allergies, but nasal polyps didn’t come up. I’ll ask.

Yes, it distorts the sense of smell and taste - my mother-in-law would smell an annoying floral aroma everywhere, can’t smell certain foods or she would get immediate heartburn, and couldn’t taste salt or taste it too much in certain hours of the day. It’s weird! But we tend to not take our sense of smell and taste so seriously so I think it should be very important to the brain to have a healthy sense of smell and taste or else you would get these “hallucinations” because it cannot be a real allergy.

My issue seems to be with amplification and lingering of odors more than distortion. I guess another issue is scents interfering with my taste during and after eating.

Yeah, I think a distorted sense implies amplification or narrow signals as well.

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