Harvard Researchers Discover Why COVID-19 Causes Loss of Smell

New York Post

One of COVID-19’s many mysteries may finally be solved.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School say they’ve discovered why some people infected with the coronavirus lose their sense of smell.

The symptom, called “anosmia” by doctors, is one of the earliest and most commonly reported indicators of the virus.

Through their analysis of various datasets, they found that it attacks cells that support the olfactory sensory neurons, which detect and transmit the sense of smell to the brain.

“Our findings indicate that the novel coronavirus changes the sense of smell in patients not by directly infecting neurons but by affecting the function of supporting cells,” said Sandeep Robert Datta, a neurobiology professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author on the paper.

That means the virus is unlikely to cause permanent damage to olfactory neural circuits, meaning patients can recover their sense of smell, the scientists said.

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