Taste Loss in Covid-19: What Do We Really Know About It?
Possible reasons for why some Covid-19 patients have taste loss but an intact sense of smell.
Google and PubMed (a biomedical database) mostly return hits on smell loss, or combined smell and taste loss, as a symptom of Covid-19 that may take weeks to resolve. But how much do we really know about Covid-19 taste loss itself?
Smell loss alone cannot explain it
We know how SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19, induces smell loss. It infects and damages the olfactory sensory epithelium that serves to maintain the health of olfactory neurons. As a result, the olfactory neurons lose their supporting structure and malfunction. And electrical signals carrying smell data into the brain gets hampered.
“Isolated taste dysfunctions are reported in Covid-19 which shows other mechanisms are involved.”
As smell and taste systems are interlaced, many believed that taste loss in Covid-19 is just the aftereffect of smell loss. While that is a valid reason, it is not the full picture. As a July review in the Journal of Craniofacial Surgery pointed out, “Isolated taste dysfunctions are reported in…
