how to get your taste buds back from having a cold

Participants took the medicine four times a day for seven days.Īlthough the trial was stopped once it was clear that the main objective of reducing viral load was not occurring, the researchers think the surprise findings about loss of smell and taste warrant additional study. The Phase II randomized trial enrolled 70 participants who tested positive for COVID-19 within three days of starting the study. Geoffrey Chupp, MD, director of the Yale Center for Asthma and Airways Disease, ran the clinical trial. Vinetz recruited several colleagues to collaborate, including Anne Spichler Moffarah, MD, PhD, an infectious diseases specialist, and Gary Desir, MD, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. Vinetz says he was originally motivated to look into camostat mesylate after he saw an April 2020 study published in Cell that showed how this medicine could prevent SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells.ĭr. (With the Omicron variant, those symptoms can still occur, but not as often as it has with other variants.) How the 'surprise' finding on loss of taste and smell was discoveredĭr.

But for others, the effect lingers in varying degrees. For many, the senses return as the infection fades. This matters because loss of smell, known as anosmia, and loss of taste are common COVID-19 symptoms. “The patients who received the drug didn’t lose any sense of smell or taste. But, to the researchers’ surprise, it brought a different type of benefit. It showed that the medication, called camostat mesylate, did little to lessen viral load.

The study, which is available on a preprint site and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, ran from June 2020 to April 2021. The scientists, led by Joseph Vinetz, MD, an infectious diseases specialist, were interested to find out if an oral medication used to treat pancreatitis could reduce the viral load (the amount of virus in your body) of SARS-CoV-2 and improve symptoms in people newly diagnosed with COVID-19. Loss of smell and taste-a hallmark symptom of COVID-19-was not on the minds of a group of Yale School of Medicine researchers when they embarked on a study in the spring of 2020.

How to get your taste buds back from having a cold