New pill helps Covid smell and taste loss fade quickly
nature.com
nature.com
We try to make up for it by encouraging him to make stuff with varied textures and components but he's been really depressed about it since. His pinterest recipe board he would share with us hasn't been updated in years and his meals typically consist of protein/starch/veggie with no seasoning as it doesn't register.
I am so hopeful for something that can bring him his sense of smell and taste back; so far his medical teams have kinda just been bouncing him around to various specialties - he even had a small surgery in an attempt but no dice.
Luckily it came back in about a week. Beer and wine tasted awful for a few weeks, and I am a fan of both. Luckily a year on, and all seems well for now.
On the flip side I can no longer order the spiciest of spicy Thai and Indian food from my usual restaurants. The owners poke fun at me now.
mind to elaborate how you can't eat chilly any longer?
I don't either. in the name of science.
In college I made a bet with a friend that I could hold dominos wings hot sauce in my mouth for 10 minutes. At the time, the wings from dominos were actually very spicy. It was painfu, I spent about 30 minutes washing my mouth out after that. I lost my sense of taste AND smell for an entire year.
Why did I lose my sense of smell and not just my taste? Any docs here to explain?
Maybe the intense overload of the pain receptors triggered some immune reaction that damaged nerves as collateral damage?
What type of surgery did you have done? I'd like to bring it up with my ENT doctor (who treats my nose as his personal polyp farm), and has prescribed only steroids (which DO work but have bad side-effects).
There are nasal decongestants out there that are essentially dilute capsaicin in suspension in saline (as a sufferer of sinus infections I have tried most things at this point). It's not pleasant, but it's less unpleasant than eating food that's way too spicy, and nowhere near as bad as getting wasabi fumes up your nose.
If memory serves there are several other ways that capsaicin can unstick the nervous system. Might be worth a try.
In 2020 I had lactoferrin on fabric tested by a university laboratory for a potential product. The product didn't go anywhere after that, but it was conclusively shown that lactoferrin did inactivate the virus by about 92% instantly and 98% in a minute.
If you want to use it as a mouthwash, the product Salivea (a quite pleasant product with a horrible name) has lactoferrin as one of the ingredients.
Then one day someone made me a cup of tea and I rhapsodised about it being the best, most flavoursome cup of tea ever and I realised I had my sense of smell back.
I wish him a full recovery.
The good part of my family dog dying was that suddenly I could smell and taste things. Switching from bland to flavour at 18 was crazy
The current Covid strain spreading in the US no longer has the loss of the sense of smell as such a common symptom.
> only around 10-20% of her Covid patients lose their sense of taste or smell now, compared to around 60-70% early in the pandemic.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/covid-symptoms-mi...
I wonder if this reflects evolutionary pressure towards symptoms that don't make you go "oh shit, definitely COVID, stay home and mask up".
That hasn't stopped the virus from spreading with increasing effectiveness and each time it moves to a new host it has a chance to mutate into something we aren't able to defend against, or something that brings new harms. The loss of warning signs letting us know when we're infected is a bad sign.
It really doesn't. They've finally stopped talking about the idiocy of every single new variant being 2x to 4x times as transmissible as the last variant because the math would be fucking stupid with an R(t) of something like >1024 by now.
They've been conflating immune evasion with intrinsic transmissibility for the past several years. That has finally started to disappear.
> each time it moves to a new host it has a chance to mutate into something we aren't able to defend against,
Except that we're not observing any pattern of mutations around T-cell epitopes in the virus suggestive of any risk of immune escape from T-cell recognition -- which it the important defense against severe disease and death and those defenses that we have are what has turned the virus milder.
The whole reason why we likely have a two tiered immune system[*] with fast neutralizing antibodies and slow T-cells is likely because the end product of 500 million years or so of evolution favored immune systems that were clever enough to force these kinds of viruses to evolve to escape only the first line of defense.
> The loss of warning signs letting us know when we're infected is a bad sign.
No, that's a sign our immune systems work and its not their first goat rodeo with a pandemic virus.
Really, how counterintuitively up your own ass do you have to be to take the very clear signs that the symptoms are abating and turn that into something to fear.
[*] well multi-tiered, but those are the two biggies of the adaptive immune system.
The other times, I had no loss of taste or smell. I do wonder why it only impacted me the first time. Different Covid variant, or something biologically changed in me, causing it to impact me differently?
I was so excited I ended up eating half the bag, lol.
The second time I contracted COVID, it was mostly just a miserable fever but I lost my smell and taste, and they still have not come back completely almost a year later.
My theory is that COVID does a random walk when eating away the brain from wherever it enters.
https://www.cnet.com/science/scientists-say-mammals-can-brea...
If I understand correctly, at that time, only a tiny slice of the population had been exposed to previous COVID variants, and something like 80% has since gotten it. It looks like the vaccination rate was something like 90% at the time, but that should still be a pretty large naive population to look at, of people who were exposed to Omicron & later with no original/Delta exposure.
As far as I know, I haven't had it since, but did get the vaccinations. Do you (does anyone here) know if there is a test to see if you did have it, or does the vaccine response swamp that signal?
However, antibodies decrease with time. (We have memory T-cells etc for long term immunity). Whilst I am not an expert, I would be very surprised if virtual induced antibodies were still detectable.
What you describe: it is very possible you had COVID, but it is also very possible you had a bad flu. There are other viruses too, like RSV, which used to be rarely mentioned, but at times can be nasty.
In contrast this test does not distinguish between virus and vaccine as the cause: <https://onlinedoctor.superdrug.com/coronavirus-antibody-test...>.
I don't have a better approach than checking the descriptions of individual antibody tests. But I know the distinction is real, because IIRC the ONS (statistics body) used tests which distinguished, when they ran their ongoing study.
Edited: to be clear we both thought prior to the antibody test that it was covid!
Probably not, there were nasty flu strains circulating then that are much more likely an explanation. It had already spread somewhat, but not enough to be a likely cause until March even in the areas with early outbreaks like Italy and NYC etc. Exponential growth means that not long before everyone has it, the vast majority don’t have it.
You could say the zinc cured your sense of smell.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7781367/
There have also been multiple reports linking the loss of taste or smell to zinc deficiency, either due to chemotherapy and metal chelating agents [38–40], or due to nutritional deficiencies, especially in older populations [41,42], also caused by medical procedures such as dialysis [43]. As a result, zinc has been proposed in the treatment of taste disorders [44,45]; however, zinc supplementation for chemotherapy-induced loss of smell or taste, which is often transient, has not led to improvements in this condition
It's taken the joy out of a lot of things she enjoys, especially cooking. She's seen a few ENT doctors and they all claim it's not coming back without any clear solutions.
Ozempic and similar medications have an even more subtle effect. Food is still just as enjoyable but the attraction to that enjoyment is gone.
Internet says it was Ben.
One usually recommend four oils (of high quality preferebly): one citrus, one mint/eucalyptus, one spicy (e.g. cinnamon) and one flowery (lavendel did wonders for me, then geranium) to start out with. Smell each oil for 20 seconds every morning and evening, while thinking of/imagening the thing you're smelling. Since it's a neurological issue, the last thing supposedly helps. It usually took me 2-3 weeks from starting training until noticing any (very minor) effect at all, and much longer to regain a lot of it.
Sorry if she's already tried, hopefully it's useful for others. It can take a long time for the training to work.
In an earlier nature.com post.. "participants who took 125-milligram ensitrelvir pills recovered from five specific symptoms — stuffy or runny nose, sore throat, cough, feeling hot or feverish and low energy or tiredness — about 24 hours earlier than did those in the control group"
Basically smelling unpleasant orders instead of normal smells once your smell returns.
I'm really looking forward to drugs like these.
I've had at least one but I suspect 2 brushes with Covid in the intervening years. They were pretty mild with no fever and only cold like symptoms.
Around March of this year (2023) I experienced a bout of Covid that reminded me of the original time I had contracted it. Fever, body aches, lightheadedness etc. The symptoms were the same just lighter in intensity and over quicker. The interesting thing is that I never lost my sense of smell and I feel like I've regained what I'd lost from my first bout of Covid.
No more blue cheese:(
When I had COVID (the first time) at one point my sense of smell became corrupted. I didn't realize it at first. For days I smelled a tangerine smell in my apartment (where I was mostly holed up in those days). I kept thinking that they were cleaning the building carpets with some sort of new cleaner, and it was coming in the vents.
After days of this I opened the window and smelled this smell much more intensely in the wind. Then with some experimentation I realized, it's me not the world.
I worried that everything would smell like that forever, but luckily it came back. Something similar happened with smoke, where I felt like certain smells (coffee, for example) smelled like someone was smoking. Another confusing experience.
At the same time I was oblivious to certain smells, I remember one time I was walking a dog with a friend and friend complained about heavy smoke smell in the air - I took a deep breath and all I could smell was fresh cold air.
Truly one of the most sobering experiences when everything tastes the same way (ie no taste), and when smell is removed from one's life altogether.
I finally got to an ENT, literally yesterday, where they did a nasal endoscopy. There was mild inflammation, but no major deviation or polyps or anything worrying the diagnosis from them was Covid related since nothing structural was observed.
I just got a taste and smell training kit that arrived from Amazon today and I think that’s basically my only course of action at this point. Here’s hoping
Took a few weeks to completely recover from all of the side effects of a covid infection.
Has any company thought of taking away people's sense of taste as a weight loss method?
My guess is that any antiviral is going to have similar effects since they all do the same basic thing which is to inhibit viral replication.
I'm surprised more people aren't getting Paxlovid. In my experience it worked great, and there is a study out that shows that it reduces the chances of long covid.
Westerners are too obese, and presumably part of that's to do with the enjoyment people get from unhealthy foods.
Whereas if you can't taste anything food's basically differently textured fuel of varying temperatures. You'd have to desire to eat e.g. yogurt with added sugar over one without.
So in your mind, there are alternative, inexpensive 6- and 12-packs of plain, unsugared yogurt sitting in national grocery chains, just waiting to be consumed by people with no sense of taste at scale?
Edit: also keep in mind that people who have lost 40% of their sensory input are apt to go through a depression, and that being sedentary has a lot of risk factors that overlap with the risks from obesity.
Some people might with diminished (but not completely eliminated) senses of smell might compensate by eating more of certain flavors that they CAN taste. Also worth noting that there are tons downsides, ignoring the obvious lack of sensory pleasure most people get from food. They are less likely to smell rotten and spoiled food, smell smoke from a nearby fire, etc.
If this works for people who have had smell & taste lost for years after recovery, that would imply that the ongoing symptoms were the result of a lingering infection. I'm not sure the referenced study demonstrates that -- as near as I can tell, it was clinically evaluated in people who had new COVID-19 infections.
I'm feeling better and no longer testing positive this week, but I still have basically no sense of smell.
The interesting thing is that I tested positive for COVID and went into quarantine, but didn't lose the sense of smell until a couple of days later. Seems like it set up shop in my lungs to start and only migrated up to the sinuses later. I also only really felt bad (low energy, aches, chills) for the first day, afterward I felt fine except for the loss of smell/taste but tested positive for another 5 days.
All groups being people who took ensitrelvir 250mg / ensitrelvir 125mg / placebo
How many of you nasty hacker news readers and commenters go to work with the same T-shirt for more than a day and don‘t shower daily?
I had colleagues where I knew whether they‘d be in the office or not by smelling them when I entered the building.
I consider myself an isotretinoin (the famous and highly effective anti acne medication with loads of dangerous, permanent side effects) "victim", in the sense that I suffer from medium to strong dry eye, nose and throat. Isotretinoin is known to improve sense of smell in those that suffer from a lack of it.
Sounds like a you-problem
Or, as many of my Indian coworkers can attest, they have a diet that just makes them smell. They are otherwise clean, hygienic, and perfectly-healthy.