The days of COVID are far from over, if a 14% case rise in United Kingdom is anything to go by. More than a few of those people will suffer loss of smell and taste. This may endure for months, even years affecting the pleasures of living. Some two million people in United States are under the whip from this, at the very moment we write.
Senses of Smell and Taste Are Intertwined
Two chemical senses combine to give us a sense of flavor, which may basically be salty, sweet, sour or bitter. They go hand-in-hand like love and marriage Frank Sinatra sang. If we can’t have one, we can’t have the other. However, the dominant driver may be smell, because this signals our brains first.
Growing older can dull our sense of smell, as the ability of olfactory neurons to regenerate declines. This may affect 50% of people aged 65 to 80 years. However loss of smell and taste was relatively rare among people under 50 before COVID, but that changed.
How the Coronavirus Affects Our Sense of Smell
“Covid-19 affected younger people much more than other forms of post-viral smell loss,” Eric Holbrook told CNN. He is an associate professor of otolaryngology, and head and neck surgery at Harvard Medical School. “You wouldn’t see much smell loss in the pediatric population, for example, and now it’s very common.”
CNN Health explains scientists originally believed COVID-19 damaged receptor neurons in the nose. These are responsible for transmitting smells from the environment to the brain. However, recent discoveries suggest the virus actually affects the cells that nourish and protect those neurons.
This is a very important role, because the transmitter neurons regenerate themselves every two to three months. “That’s one of the reasons we sometimes see a delayed effect,” Justin Turner explains.
The associate professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville continues, “People may have some smell loss that recovers. Then later they have a second wave of smell loss, because that regenerative capacity is malfunctioning.”
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