Scientists have discovered how COVID-19 causes many people to lose their sense of smell. And they have good news: The loss appears to be temporary because the actual cells in the nose that detect the odor are not damaged.
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Doctors call temporary loss of smell “anosmia”. It is one of the oldest and most commonly reported indicators of COVID-19. In fact, studies suggest that it is a better predictor of infection with disease than fever and cough.
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At least half of all states have either slowed the reopening or taken new measures to combat the growing number of COVID-19 cases.
But it was unclear exactly why people with COVID-19 stop smelling. Damage or inflammation of the olfactory sensory neurons that detect and transmit smell to the brain was thought to cause the problem.
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That turned out to be wrong.
In an article published Friday, the researchers discovered that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, instead attacks cells that support those odor-detecting neurons, but not the neurons themselves.
“The new coronavirus changes the sense of smell in patients by not directly infecting neurons but by affecting support cell function,” said Sandeep Robert Datta, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the article published in the Scientific advances magazine.
This is good news because it means that the infection is unlikely to permanently damage the olfactory neural circuits of COVID-19 patients.
“Once the infection goes away, the olfactory neurons don’t seem to need to be replaced or rebuilt from scratch,” he said. “But we need more data and a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms to confirm this conclusion.”
COVID-19 patients generally regain their sense of smell over the course of several weeks. In other viral infections that damage olfactory neurons, it can take months for patients to regain their sense of smell.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why do so many COVID patients lose their sense of smell? Scientists now know this.
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