New treatment restores sense of smell in some people with long COVID

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 clearTrusted Source after four weeks, but for some people it takes months.

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.

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 “stellate ganglion block”Trusted Source — which involves injecting anesthetic into the nerve cluster in order to stimulate the autonomic nervous system.

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 treat long COVID symptoms in a study setting.

The study consisted of a group of 54 people who had been resistant to pharmaceutical and other traditional medical treatments for parosmia.

Of those, researchers followed up with 37 participants, 22 of whom reported improved symptoms a week after treatment. In addition, most of these participants reported significant additional improvement a month after treatment.

Three months later, researchers reported that there was an average 49% improvement in these symptoms among the group. In addition, 86% of this same group who responded to the first injection had additional improvements after a second injection administered to the other side of the neck after six weeks.

Those who did not respond to the first round of injection also did not respond to the second, however. Meaning this isn’t a cure-all.

These findings have not been published yet in a peer-reviewed journal.

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