Losing Your Sense of Taste and Smell With the Coronavirus

 One day within the spring of 2020, round the time much of the country went on lockdown to blunt the spread of the coronavirus, Sara Buursma felt run-down and was battling a low-grade fever. "I was working tons , and that i have three young kids," she says. "I thought it had been a standard cold."

Three days later, Buursma lost two of her major senses. "I couldn't smell anything," she says. "I tried smelling essential oils and flavorer , which usually makes my eyes water. i could not smell anything."

 

Buursma also was unable to taste food – including her favorite flavor of Ben & Jerry's frozen dessert . "I was so disappointed," she says. "You want something good to eat when you are feeling terrible."

 

Three weeks later, Buursma experienced chest congestion and a severe, dry cough. Shortly then , she was diagnosed with COVID-19. The diagnosis explained Buursma's sudden loss of taste and smell.

 

Anosmia may be a condition that causes an individual to "partially or completely lose his or her sense of smell," consistent with Yale Medicine. "Some people are born without the sense of smell, which may be a condition called congenital anosmia." this is often a standard symptom of the coronavirus, which isn't surprising, consistent with the American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery, which says that "viral infections are a number one explanation for loss of sense of smell, and COVID-19 is caused by an epidemic ." Symptoms of anosmia include not just the loss of smell but changes in how food tastes.

 

In fact, it isn't unusual to lose sense of smell with any virus infection within the nose, including other coronaviruses that cause the cold . The academy says that a gaggle of otolaryngologists within the U.K. noted that 2 out of three confirmed COVID-19 cases in Germany reported a loss of sense of smell and 30% of individuals in South Korea with mild symptoms who tested positive for COVID-19 reported anosmia as their main symptom.

Smell Plus Taste Equals Flavor

Research suggests that as many as 70% of individuals who contract COVID-19 lose their sense of smell, says Dr. Marc Sala, a pulmonary and important care specialist at the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive COVID-19 Center in Chicago. Most of those patients regain their senses of smell and taste within about eight weeks.

 

Taste, however, is another issue. "The definition of taste to a patient and to a physician are very different," said Dr. Joseph K. Han, professor of otolaryngology, director of the division of rhinology and endoscopic sinus-skull base surgery and director of the division of allergy at Eastern Virginia school of medicine .

 

"Physicians mention the five taste sensations," he says.

 

The five taste sensations are:

 

Sweet.

Sour.

Salty.

Bitter.

Umami (often described as savory).

Viruses don't typically affect those senses directly. "Losing sense of taste is from a totally different nerve system, a special disease process," Han says.

 

While there's evidence indicating that COVID-19 affects the taste system of some people, the precise mechanism isn't known, says Steven Munger, director of the University of Florida Center for Smell and Taste, located within UF's McKnight Brain Institute in Gainesville, Florida. this is often independent of the impact of smell loss on flavor.

 

Yet, albeit the sense of taste isn't altered, smell features a direct effect on how we perceive the flavour of foods, Han says. "We should use the term sense of flavor, because flavor isn't taste, it's smell."

 

"Flavor is that the perception created by your brain when it combines the smell and taste of food or drink," Munger adds. "Smell, not taste, is what allows you to differentiate lemon from lime; both taste sour, but they smell slightly different."

 

Some people with COVID-19 also lose chemesthesis, the power to sense chemicals in chili peppers, herbs and spices like capsaicin during a jalapeno or menthol in mint.

 

More than a year after she lost both her sense of smell and taste, Buursma says her sense of taste hasn't fully returned. "Things still don't taste right," she says. "There are times once I (eat something and) think, 'I do not like this like I wont to .'"

Theories About the Coronavirus and Sense of Smell

How does this coronavirus disrupt the sense of smell? "There are three leading theories," Munger says.

 

The first is that the virus is using the nervii olfactorii to transfer across the skull into the brain.

The second suggests the virus is attacking sensory cells themselves, "damaging or mucking up the works," he says.

The third possibility is that the virus is attacking nasal tissues more generally, causing inflammation or other disease processes that interfere with normal smelling function.

This last idea currently has the best scientific support. "An extensive analysis of organic phenomenon data in nasal tissue has found that two genes important for the entry of this class of viruses into cells are found to be turned on in nasal cells that surround the nerve cells that sense odors, but not in those nerve cells themselves," Munger says.

This suggests the virus causes a more global, perhaps inflammatory response that disrupts the power to smell, Munger says. He adds that the majority patients are reporting they get their sense of smell back after a couple of weeks, "which would be according to the sort of smell loss with any upper respiratory tract infection ." However, research suggests that about 5% of those patients have prolonged, and maybe permanent, smell loss. Distorted smell, or parosmia, is additionally being reported in some patients.

 

Scientists and clinicians round the world who study smell and taste are working together to fast-track data collection on this symptom of COVID-19 and to develop tests patients can do reception .

 

"It is now clear that smell loss is that the most predictive symptom of COVID-19, more so than others like fever or cough," Munger says. "We et al. are now studying whether smell testing – particularly within the school, workplace or home – might be wont to provide an early warning of COVID-19. We also hope that the increased awareness of anosmia will end in more regular screening of smell function as a part of regular health care."

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