For three years, a 50-year-old man in Addis Ababa was convinced his nose gave off the smell of a dead mouse. He washed it with water, then salt water, then nasal drops. He wore a mask and said the smell escaped it anyway. He stopped going to funerals, weddings and church. Eventually he separated from his wife and children and moved out alone.
Every physical examination came back clean. He had been through multiple hospitals without an answer before an ear, nose and throat department referred him to psychiatry. The diagnosis, described in a case report published in January in the Journal of Medical Case Reports, was olfactory reference syndrome. The author, a psychiatrist at Addis Ababa University, reports that a structured search of regional literature turned up no previously published case from East Africa.
