Loss of taste, smell resolves within 3 years of COVID-19 infection, study shows
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2023/11/09/COVID-19-taste-smell-resolves/8331699547160/
Excerpt:
There’s good news for folks who lost some of their sense of taste and smell after a bout of mild COVID-19: New research shows this side effect largely resolves by three years after infection.
.....Italian researchers looked at post-COVID outcomes for 88 people who lost their sense of taste and smell early in in the pandemic, with everyone contracting “mild” COVID-19 during March and April of 2020. Patients averaged 49 years of age at the study’s start.
Mild COVID-19 was defined as an illness without any evidence of lower respiratory disease.
Compared to 88 people who had never tested positive for COVID-19, rates of loss of smell and/or taste (as measured by standard tests) were roughly equal three years later, said a team led by Dr. Paolo Boscolo-Rizzo of the University of Trieste in Italy.
“At the 3-year study end point, olfactory dysfunction was comparable between both groups,” the group reported Nov. 9 in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.
As for a loss of the sense of taste (”gustatory dysfunction”), Boscolo-Rizzo’s group similarly found “no significant differences” between folks who’d had mild COVID-19 and the never-COVID-19 groups, two and three years later.
.....The bottom line, according to the researchers: Former COVID-19 patients “should be reassured that a recovery of olfaction appears to continue over 3 years after initial infection.”