Loss of Taste and Smell From COVID-19, and How to Get Them Back

Here’s what to know about how COVID-19 can cause you to lose your senses of taste and smell, how it can affect your life, and how to get these senses back.

Losing your ability to taste and smell not only diminishes your enjoyment of food and pleasant aromas — it can also affect your mental health, physical health, and safety.

The loss of these senses can result in weight loss or weight gain, as well as an unhealthy diet, says Pamela Dalton, PhD, MPH, a chemosensory scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. “Many people with smell loss also report feeling disoriented in the world, experience struggles with intimate relationships, and [may develop] depression.”

Most of the time, a person’s senses of taste and smell will come back on their own soon after recovering from a COVID infection. When they don’t, there’s no guaranteed way to treat this condition. Here’s what we know so far.

Medical Treatments and Therapies

Research is still in the early stages, but the following therapies are being investigated:

• Medications: These include steroid nasal drops, sprays, and large-volume irrigation.

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• Stellate ganglion block: In this procedure, anesthesia is injected into nerves in the neck.

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• Neuromodulation: This treatment uses either magnetic pulses or electrical currents to stimulate specific nerves or areas of the brain.

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• Platelet-rich plasma: In this treatment, a concentrated solution of your own blood cells is injected around the olfactory nerves.

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There is not enough evidence yet to show how effective these treatments are or who might benefit.

Olfactory Training

While taste and smell are two distinct senses, they work together to give flavor to what you eat and drink. So, restoring your sense of taste may start with your nose.

Anthony Del Signore, MD, director of rhinology and skull base surgery at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in New York City, has seen promising results in patients using olfactory training, or “smell therapy.”

“We’ve been using essential oils, basically as smelling rehab,” Dr. Del Signore says. “We typically use lemon, cloves, and around three or four different oils.” Rose and eucalyptus are common scents to try. “We tell patients to breathe it in and out and try to remember what it smelled like. It can help to get neural pathways reestablished. It does take a little bit of time, around three to six months, but we’ve seen a good response with that,” he says.

Even though smell therapy has not been rigorously studied in COVID-19 patients, Del Signore says, “We recommend patients at least try it. It’s not going to hurt anything.”

1. Choose four distinct scents.
2. Sniff each scent gently for about 20 seconds, concentrating on what you’re trying to smell.
3. Repeat this process twice a day.
4. Continue for at least 12 weeks or until you notice improvement.

Home Remedies

While you can find all kinds of purported home remedies on social media — like eating foods with a particularly strong flavor — nothing has been found to be as effective as olfactory training, says Dr. Dalton. “Many people do begin to enjoy spicy food because that sensation is often preserved when smell or taste is lost. So, there’s no harm in [eating] spicy food, but there have been no randomized controlled trials to show that it’s effective.”

COVID impacts taste and smell differently than other viral infections.

With a cold, you may have trouble smelling because of swelling in your nose and sinuses. “COVID has a different component to it,” says Lisa Sanders, MD, medical director of the Yale School of Medicine Long Covid Multidisciplinary Care Center. “It does not destroy the sensors in your nose and your mouth that affect smell or taste, but it does seem to affect the cells that support those sensors. And so when you lose your sense of taste and smell, it’s because those supporting structures are injured.”

While it’s possible to only lose your sense of smell with COVID, most of the time the sense of taste is also affected because of how interrelated the two are.

“When we eat or drink, taste receptors in our mouth detect sensations such as sweet, salty, bitter, sour, or umami at the same time the volatile molecules from the food or beverage migrate up the back of our throat to stimulate odor receptors and provide the sensations that allow us to distinguish a strawberry from a blueberry,” says Dalton. “Loss of smell greatly impacts flavor perception, and many people attribute that loss to losing taste.”

• Symptoms last more than two weeks with no improvement.
• Loss of taste or smell is accompanied by symptoms like headaches, memory issues, or vision changes.
• Loss of taste or smell occurs without a COVID-19 diagnosis.

• Losing the ability to taste and smell is a common symptom of COVID that usually resolves on its own within a few months.
• Long-term loss of taste and smell can be a safety hazard and can also have effects on mental health.
• There are no proven medical treatments to help restore sense of taste and smell, but olfactory training can help.