After losing sense of smell with COVID, at-home training can bring it back - The Morning Sun

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For many people one of the first signs they may be infected with the COVID-19 virus is that they lose their sense of smell.

It varies person to person, but for some getting that sense of smell back requires olfactory training.

If you’ve got an onion, a lemon, oregano and other fruits in your kitchen, you have got the ingredients needed to start working on getting the smell back, according to Dr. Omar Danoun, a specialist in neurology, epilepsy and neurophysiology at the Henry Ford Health System.

The doctor said about 50-80 percent of people who have COVID lose their sense of smell — it’s called anosmia — and about 10 percent have long-term smell loss.

“We’re having an evolution now with a very high demand for olfactory training. Before if somebody had a flu or something like that, the smell loss is a rare complication relatively and usually it resolves with the flu resolving. It was not a major issue that was impacting millions of people’s lives,’’ Danoun said.

And now with millions of cases of COVID-19 it has all changed.

“When somebody loses their sense of smell, usually the COVID virus attaches itself to the support cells that nourish and take care of the nerves that are responsible for smelling,’’ Danoun explained. “The problem is mostly — not all of the time — it is not in the nerves themselves, it’s in the support cells that take care of the needs of the nerve cells. They take care of them, they nourish them. When they get hit hard by COVID-19 the nerve cells are hanging without any support and they stop working.

“Once the body regenerates those support cells then the nerve will start clicking. Sometimes the nerve does not click all the way or only clicks a small amount and we really need to push to really wake up the nerve and get it to work. This is olfactory training,’’ Danoun said.

This is where the odors from the kitchen come in, requiring four different scents.

He recommends 25 seconds of sniffing a scent, wait for one minute for the brain to click and process it and moving to the next one, 25 seconds and so forth using four scents

“You do that in the morning and at night. If you do it everyday, finally the nerve will click back and then the smell will come back and start working again,’’ said Danoun whose videos can be found on YouTube.

He emphasizes that consistency is the key. Twice a day, every day.

If that does not bring back the sense of smell in a month, he recommends using a variety of essential oils in three-month stints. Use the same four oils for three months, then switch to different oils for the next three months and so on.

“It takes nine months of working to smell these things until it clicks back. It’s because our nerves grow very, very slowly. … We’re designed this way. The skin changes every 7 days, your stomach lining changes every day, but your brain is with you since you’re born and is with you your entire life …. A consequence of that is to relearn something it takes a very long time to recover,’’ Danoun said.

“Don’t expect overnight recovery, but be consistent and do the olfactory training every single day, twice a day,’’ he said. “That’s when the results happen and you get life-changing experiences.’’

If the olfactory training does not work he suggests it could be because of an underlying condition such as allergies or sinusitis that needs to be treated.

While anosmia (loss of smell) is the most common form of smell disorder due to COVID-19, phantosmia (smelling phantom odors) and paraosmia (when scents become distorted) can occur too. Both of those conditions require medical care.

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After losing sense of smell with COVID, at-home training can bring it back - The Morning Sun
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