- Some people with long COVID report lasting alterations to their sense of taste and smell.
- A new treatment might help these people regain those senses and restore quality of life.
- Experts say even if the treatment is broadly successful not all patients will respond to this therapy.
A novel treatment could restore a normal sense of smell and taste in people with long COVID who have not responded to other therapies, a new study suggests.
Alterations or outright loss of taste and smell are common COVID-19 symptoms, affecting about half of everyone who gets the novel coronavirus. Most of the time, these symptoms
And for some people with long COVID, distortions in the sense of smell and taste — called phantosmia and parosmia, respectively — related to COVID-19 can last far longer.
In these people, while the condition is non-life-threatening, experts say their quality of life suffers.
“Post-COVID parosmia is common and increasingly recognized,” Dr. Adam Zoga, a study author and a professor of musculoskeletal radiology at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said in a press release. “Patients can develop a distaste for foods and drinks they used to enjoy.”
In the new research, which is being presented at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America, doctors targeted a cluster of nerves in the neck called the stellate ganglion.
The treatment involves delivering a block to the stellate ganglion — aptly called a
It’s a technique that has been used to attempt to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cluster headaches, and certain rare diseases, but this is the first time it has been used to attempt to…
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