Living without one of your five senses can significantly impact your daily life, as Little Mix’s Perrie Edwards recently revealed. She shared a terrifying incident where she missed crucial signs of danger due to her lack of smell.
The pop sensation discovered she was born without a sense of smell during a horrifying incident when a fire broke out in her childhood home. The Mirror reports that Perrie only became aware of the blaze when black smoke filled the room, making it difficult for her to breathe.
This uncommon health condition is known as congenital anosmia, a birth defect affecting one in every 10,000 Brits. Sensory charity Fifth Sense states that most people don’t realise they lack this sense until mid-childhood when someone at school points it out. However, the cause can vary.
For many who are born without the ability to smell and discover this in their childhood, it could be an early indicator of a more severe issue that might affect their adolescence. Known as Kallmann Syndrome, anosmia can result from a problem with the hypothalamus, which plays a role in producing sex hormones that trigger puberty, reports Gloucestershire Live.
Loss of smell is a distinctive sign of this syndrome, setting it apart from other medical conditions that inhibit puberty. While it can lead to infertility, doctors can manage it with hormone replacement therapy.
Another bizarre reason for being born without a sense of smell is congenital pain insensitivity, an uncommon condition that leads to the brain misinterpreting pain signals. This disorder means individuals can harm themselves unknowingly, as many don’t even perceive heat.
Fifth Sense clarified: “Many people with congenital insensitivity to pain also have a complete loss of the sense of smell because the same channels that transmit messages of pain from the pain site to the brain can affect the channels in the olfactory sensory neurons that transmit messages of smell signals to the brain.”
Indeed, those born incapable of feeling pain might not even realise their inability to smell, yet this challenging condition often comes with a diminished sense of taste a frequent consequence of anosmia.
The third most prevalent cause of anosmia is also the simplest and the type Perrie Edwards was found to have following a fire at her family home, known as isolated congenital anosmia.
This particular smell disorder doesn’t present additional symptoms, leading some individuals to remain unaware of their condition. Unlike brain-related causes, this form of anosmia stems from a defect in the nose’s olfactory receptors, which transform airborne particles into electrical signals that the brain interprets as distinct odours.
As Perrie Edwards discovered, there are little effective treatments for this condition. She said: “I had surgery, came out, had big tampons in my nose, recovered for a while. And then I swear to God I could smell coffee. I woke up and smelled the coffee.”
However, her regained sense of smell soon disappeared again. Perrie decided against further attempts to restore it, saying: “I was like, I’m not going through that again. I don’t care. If I had it and lost it, fair enough. But I’ve never had it, so why care? “.