The loss of taste and smell — hallmarks of a coronavirus infection early in the pandemic — became a stubborn blight for many long COVID-19 sufferers, but new research shows that the sensory problems gradually abate.
Smell and taste disturbances were reported in almost two-thirds of the 100 people who had caught a mild case of COVID-19 in the fall of 2020 in Trieste, Italy, and were randomly selected for studying alongside 100 uninfected people for comparison. Both groups were followed for three years.
About a quarter of the COVID-19 cases couldn’t taste properly a year after the acute illness but, after two years, there was little difference between them and controls. The research, published Thursday in a letter to the journal JAMA Otolaryngology, suggests that so-called gustatory dysfunction, linked to the taste bud-damaging immune response to lingering vestiges of SARS-CoV-2 in the tongue, resolves faster than problems with smell.
More than a quarter of the COVID-19 group still experienced olfactory dysfunction two years after infection, but after three years, the condition wasn’t significantly more common than in controls, the researchers found.
