Loss of smell can happen with seasonal allergy, but may also be an early sign of COVID-19 disease.
A runny or stuffy nose, cough, tiredness, even shortness of breath and a lack of smell/taste can occur in both allergies and COVID-19. But a cough from COVID-19 is typically dry, whereas in allergies, a cough is wet and usually more sneeze-like. A stuffy nose from allergies can cause loss of taste/smell.
Clean the Inside of Your Nose
Once the virus has run its course and some symptoms have disappeared, you may still experience anosmia. Allergies can also cause your nasal passages to swell and become inflamed. Nose cleaning can help reduce this swelling and inflammation, which can help you regain your sense of smell.
Allergies can cause severe congestion in the nose, which makes them a common culprit for loss of smell and taste. Allergies can be treated with both OTC and prescription medications, including antihistamines, nasal sprays, allergy drops, and allergy shots.
Olfactory retraining is the process of retraining your nose to smell. It involves smelling strong scents (citrus, cloves, eucalyptus) every day while thinking about what they smell like to try to help reform normal responses to your nose and brain.
Illness or Infection
Anything that irritates and inflames the inner lining of your nose and makes it feel stuffy, runny, itchy, or drippy can affect your senses of smell and taste. This includes the common cold, sinus infections, allergies, sneezing, congestion, the flu, and COVID-19.
According to Tajudeen, smell loss is most commonly caused by nasal and sinus inflammation. This inflammation can occur due to sinusitis, polyps in the nose and even allergies. It can act as a barrier for smell molecules to enter your nose, meaning you can't physically pick up the smell.
Among the case group, after the use of fluticasone spray in the nose and triamcinolone paste in the mouth there was a statistically significant improvement in recognizing all the odours and taste on day 5 compared to day 1.
Rinsing the inside of your nose with a saltwater solution may help if your sense of smell is affected by an infection or allergy. You can make a saltwater solution at home. Boil a pint of water, then leave it to cool. Mix a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) into the water.
The other most common cause of smell loss is that due to an ongoing process in the nose and/or sinuses, specifically rhinitis (inflammation in the nose), nasal polyps and/or sinusitis. The history usually is that of gradual loss of smell ability proceeding to total loss.
Timothy Smith, ear, nose and throat specialist at Oregon Health & Science University. “We found that probably 80% of those patients who have a loss or distortion of their sense of smell will recover that sense about one to three months after the COVID-19 infection has resolved.
Causes. Loss of smell can be caused by: Medicines that change or decrease the ability to detect odors, such as amphetamines, estrogen, naphazoline, trifluoperazine, long-term use of nasal decongestants, reserpine, and possibly zinc-based products.
When you're congested, it can interfere with the ability to detect scents properly. This can result in a reduced sense of smell, which in turn, affects our sense of taste. Loss of taste is a common symptom experienced by people who are suffering from nasal congestion.
For instance, a child with a flu or COVID-19 may have a fever, body aches, chills, a sore throat, weakness, and respiratory symptoms. Someone with allergies will be more likely to have the symptoms centered on the nose, eyes, and throat, and they usually won't have a fever.
Coughing and shortness of breath are symptoms of both COVID-19 and allergies, which can make things confusing. But, one major difference between COVID-19 and allergies is a fever. If your temperature rises, then it's most likely not allergies. “Seasonal allergies do not cause fever.
This connection was not impaired in people who had regained their sense of smell after Covid. The findings suggest smell loss, known as anosmia, caused by long Covid is linked to a change in the brain that stops smells from being processed properly.
A traditional olfactory training protocol uses four specific scents: rose, lemon, eucalyptus, and clove.
If you're exposed to the same smell for a period longer than an hour, it can take a day for your sensitivity to that odor to return. If you're exposed to the same smell repeatedly, it can take even longer for your sensitivity to return.
For the most part, people who have a smell stuck in their nose are more likely to be dealing with phantosmia, which involves smelling odors that are not present, instead they're entirely created by your nose and brain.
Intranasal zinc products, decongestant nose sprays, and certain oral drugs, such as nifedipine and phenothiazines, are examples of drugs that may cause permanent loss of smell.
Patients who were treated with a short oral prednisolone treatment experienced an improved sense of smell in two small studies [18,19,20]. However, these studies have a low level of evidence because of the limited number of cases (n = 9), short follow-up (4–10 weeks), and the non-blinded study designs.
But without your sense of smell, you wouldn't be able to detect delicate, subtle flavors. Most of the time, losing your sense of smell isn't serious. But there are instances in which anosmia indicates other, more serious health conditions.
Loss of smell can be one of the most persistent symptoms of long COVID-19. Most people get better in a few weeks, but for some people, it can take longer – sometimes over a year. In one study, about 25% of people who lost their sense of smell hadn't regained it within 60 days of getting sick.