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Zara Patel, MD

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Palo Alto, CA
Zara Patel, MD

Dr. Zara M. Patel is Director of Endoscopic Skull Base Surgery and Professor of Otolaryngology

12/02/2025

❤️Giving Tuesday is here!
If you have the capacity to donate, please consider donating to help support our research here at the Stanford Initiative to Cure Smell and Taste Loss.

▶️Smell is one of our most important protective defense mechanisms, it is how we make first impressions of each other, it is how you choose your lifelong mate, and it is how mothers and infants bond. It impacts every single human interaction, without us even realizing it.

🛑Losing the sense of smell causes a 4 fold increase in mortality - it is the only sense whose loss is linked to increased rate of death.
🧠This may be because loss of smell is one of the earliest signs of neurodegenerative disease. Diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and others.
🙏🏼To speed research in prevention and treatment of these diseases, please donate now at the link below to Make a Gift to the Stanford Initiative to Cure Smell and Taste Loss!
We greatly need and appreciate your help! (And you can write it off on your taxes! 🤗)

https://med.stanford.edu/smell/make-gift.html

Stanford OHNS

10/08/2025

💥Hardest and longest I’ve worked on a study in my life! Three years to complete, a year from presentation to publication, for those of you out there walking this path, you know an end result like this is only after a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.

🤖I know there’s a lot of AI news out there - but here we present a truly groundbreaking step - physicians with no coding background utilizing a publicly available AI platform to diagnose specific tumor types based on imaging alone. Could this lead to a future without need for painful, complex, and costly biopsy? Yes, yes it could.

💞So grateful and proud of all my co-authors who contributed in so many different ways - we could not have accomplished this without you.(Too many authors to tag - please tag yourselves!)

🔗Link to read this article published in Communications Medicine in the Nature portfolio - will be filed under their AI and Cancer section online.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-025-01134-9?utm_source=rct_congratemailt&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oa_20251008&utm_content=10.1038/s43856-025-01134-9

09/18/2025

🧡💛🧡 Our friend and visiting scholar, Dr. Wongworawut from Thailand, completed the analysis on these patients of ours prior to the pandemic! After this study got lost in the shuffle and chaos of the ensuing years, I’m so glad to finally bring his hard work to publication and bring this interesting data to the field!

🧠 It turns out that when a pituitary tumor produces hormones, this doesn’t only affect the rest of the body - it directly affects the sinonasal tissue - the corridor we use to access and remove these tumors.
This changes quality of life for these patients, both before and after surgery, compared to patients with non-hormone producing tumors. But with the right post-operative care, these patients can have equally great outcomes!

Thanks to all my co-authors!
Yossawee Wongworawut
Peter Hwang Jayakar Nayak Robert Dodd and Juan C. Fernandez-Miranda

👩🏻‍⚕️Surgeons can use this data to better counsel and prepare their patients for what to expect after surgery. 🩺🔪Educating patients always leads to better surgical outcomes!

🔗Link to full study here:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40960129/

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford University

09/10/2025

↗️ There are many steps needed in the development of a truly objective olfactory test and eventual stimulation device. Knowing how long topical anesthesia affects olfactory capability is crucial to understanding when we can start recording electrical signals once a device is comfortably placed.

A device such as this will allow us to test loss of smell more accurately, screen for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and eventually use electrical stimulation for regeneration.

☑️ This small step is now complete, thanks to help from Maxime Fieux, Esther Wang, and David Liu.
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Link to full study here:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/lio2.70250

The research and device design process is a slow and steady one. To donate to fund and speed our efforts, please visit our website: The Stanford Initiative to Cure Smell and Taste Loss and go to the Make a Gift tab. 🙏🏼💕

https://med.stanford.edu/smell/make-gift.html

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine

08/12/2025

We’ve had this news for a little while, and I am a bit behind on posting, but still wanted to share because I am so proud of our company, team, and CEO Parnian Lak - Olfera and our olfactory brain-on-chip is going to space! 🤩🤩🤩🚀

Investigating how neurons age in the accelerated aging environment of the International Space Station National Laboratory will allow us to learn so much about healthy aging and neurodegenerative diseases we experience here on 🌎, and thus allow us to develop better treatments for them.

05/31/2025

🦠As our nation’s healthcare administrators recommend removing COVID19 vaccination for pregnant women and children (groups long recognized by the medical community as vulnerable because of suppressed or not yet completely developed immune systems), millions of people in the US and around the world continue to get infected with the disease and suffer the long term consequences of having had the infection.

💔Although the majority of these people who lose their smell and taste from the infection will regain it on their own without intervention, at least 15-25% will have permanent loss - imagine never tasting another meal or drink for the rest of your life, imagine never smelling your child/partner/parent/ ever again, imagine never again smelling the sea air or the fresh scent of the forest or the comforting aroma of coffee in the morning.It is devastating to these individuals.

⭐️For the first time ever, we have found an intervention that may actually help prevent this loss of smell and taste from becoming permanent if taken early in the first week after diagnosis - a well known treatment for the infection itself - Paxlovid.

⚡️In the early days of the pandemic, we recommended this intervention to prevent major illness, hospitalization and death. Now that the symptoms are not as severe, physicians can still use this to help prevent LongCOVID disability like loss of smell and taste, along with other symptoms it has shown to prevent in other studies.
Importantly - in this era of mistrust in science - our study was NOT funded by any drug company!
🎙️Spread the word!

🔗Link to article:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40444408/

🤗Congratulations Esther Wang on getting this publication of ours over the finish line!

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford University

05/22/2025

🙏🏼Thanks Amber Luong and The American Rhinologic Society for featuring our work on the latest It Out podcast from the International Forum of Allergy and Rhinology - the highest impact journal in all of !
💉🩸We discuss the Long term outcomes of PRP injections for Post-Viral Smell Loss.
🔗Link is here for those that want to take a listen:
https://www.scopeitoutpodcast.com

Visit the Treatment Options tab at our website
https://sicstl.stanford.edu for more information

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford University

05/06/2025

So excited to announce our launch of the
⚡️Stanford Initiative to Cure Smell and Taste Loss!⚡️
I have been investigating the underlying causes of smell loss and treating patients with smell loss for the last fifteen years. Now, with evidence showing that smell loss could not only be the earliest sign of neurodegenerative diseases such as ’s and ’s, but in fact the olfactory cortex could be where the degeneration actually begins, research in this area is even more important and urgent!

Visit our website

https://sicstl.stanford.edu

to learn more!

If you have the capacity to donate to this important research, please visit the “Make a Gift” tab, and make a donation in honor of yourself or a loved one - each individual gift gets us that much closer to both treatments for smell and taste loss as well as early screening for dementia and potential treatments for AD and PD as well!
We are committed to moving forward and leading the way in science and medicine - help us if you can!

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford University

03/14/2025

📻🎙️My interview about treating smell loss on NPR with Joe and Terry Graedon of the People’s Pharmacy will broadcast this weekend!
Anyone can listen on Saturday , March 15th at 7 a.m. EST and on Sunday, March 16th at 3 p.m. EST on their computer or smartphone at wunc.org, or on one of the 200 NPR radio stations across the country that broadcast it. By March 17 the podcast will be up on Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

🔗Link to listen:

https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/articles/show-1422-the-science-of-smell?utm_source=The%20People%27s%20Pharmacy%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=4ade79197f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_03_14_03_30&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_7300006d3c-4ade79197f-220755773

⏰ A reminder for those suffering with post-viral ( or otherwise) parosmia (smell distortion) that you have had for greater than 6 months but less than two years, email smellstudy@stanford.edu to enroll in our next clinical trial.

Stanford OHNS
Stanford University
Stanford Health Care
NPR

02/15/2025

👏🏼👏🏼Kudos to Chrissi Kelly for sharing her story with The Guardian and to Claire Hopkins for taking the leap to be the first to begin offering injections to patients to treat smell loss in the UK!
(Link to full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/15/anosmia-smell-loss-hope-for-sufferers )

😎Those of you who follow me have seen our work to vet and test for and . From our initial pre-pandemic pilot study, to the randomized controlled trial on induced smell loss, to the most recent long term follow up post-viral cohort study, to the recent case report on improving post-traumatic loss 45 years out from injury.
🕰️ Time to start incorporating this into your practice everyone - my smell clinic has a year and a half wait list and I can’t take care of all these patients myself!

🙏🏼 All I ask of my fellow physicians is that you are completely honest and transparent with your patients - you need at least three injections to see a significant difference, it does not help everyone, and there is wide variability in the amount of improvement - but it does help the majority of patients we have tried this in!

Recruiting now for our randomized controlled trial to test this treatment option for - contact smellstudy@stanford.edu

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford University
Stanford Health Care

01/17/2025

Always such an honor to have your peers recognize your work and dedication to excellent patient care.

To all my colleagues who have entrusted their patients to me for sinus surgery, sinus and nasal tumor resection, sinus cancer treatment, skull base surgery, smell loss and more, thank you for your confidence in me! 🙏🏼❤️
.

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Health Care
Stanford University

01/09/2025

🤖Does it feel like AI can do anything? There have been multiple studies showing AI performing better than human doctors at diagnostic and patient counseling tasks. But is this always the case?

❌In a niche surgical sub-sub-specialty like rhinology — it appears the answer is - not quite yet!
Click the link below to read our study and find out why.

Kudos to Alice Huang for getting this study across the finish line to publication! And thanks to all the co-authors that worked on this with us!

This doesn’t mean that AI, including ChatGPT and others, has not already begun to make inroads and be of incredible use to us as physicians - it has!

Anyone that follows me knows of the incredible success we’ve had utilizing AI to differentiate certain benign tumors from cancer in the sinuses, over multiple studies we have presented and published.

You can also read the recent study I was a co-author on, led by Maxime Fieux, MD-PhD in France, showing that ChatGPT could be utilized for creating patient education materials of high quality. And you can read the perspective on AI and Otolaryngology I was a co-author on, led by my colleagues at Mount Sinai Alfred Marc Calo Iloreta Jr. and Satish Govindaraj discussing how ChatGPT could revolutionize our field.

But keep that little grain of salt on hand whenever you’re asking it for medical advice - especially when it’s not a primary care or urgent care kind of question - looks like you still need us around for a little while. 😉

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39776758/

Stanford OHNS
Stanford Medicine
Stanford Health Care
American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery

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