Adriana Izquierdo is a member of the Clinical and experimental respiratory immunoallergy research group, which is led by Joaquim Mullol.
Her thesis, entitled “Olfactory and/or taste dysfunction during the COVID-19 pandemic: the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on the sense of smell”, was directed by Isam Alobid. Including a study of 989 COVID-19 patients at 15 hospitals in Spain, it describes olfactory dysfunction and its relation to other serious inflammatory markers.
The thesis concludes that taste and smell dysfunction are common symptoms in COVID-19. These dysfunctions occur mainly in young and non-hospitalised patients, since it is observed that the greater the severity of the olfactory dysfunction, the less severe the pneumonia.
Adriana Izquierdo also received another award for best doctoral thesis read in 2021 at the 73rd National Congress of the Spanish Society of Otorhinolaryngology (SEORL), held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 2022, a prize worth 1,000 euros.
