It started with a smell. A 56-year-old woman living in Portugal began noticing that bricks lying on the ground, such as those at construction sites, gave off a "strangely pleasant smell." About seven months later, she was grinding bricks into powder and eating them, hiding them at home from her family.
Psychiatrists at Unidade Local de Saúde Gaia/Espinho in Vila Nova de Gaia described her case in a report in the Journal of Eating Disorders, published May 18, 2026. Their proposal is unusual: the brick smell itself, made more appealing by severe iron deficiency, may have opened the door to her pica. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case in which an olfactory craving induced pica development," the authors wrote.
