COVID Smell Loss: ‘Retraining’ Mostly Flops in Trial

(MedPageToday) Bimodal olfactory training with visual cues and the use of patient-preferred scents did not produce a clinically meaningful improvement in sense of smell among individuals with COVID-19–related olfactory loss, a 275-patient randomized trial showed. Among participants with post-COVID infection olfactory loss equally randomized to bimodal patient-preferred, bimodal physician-assigned, unimodal patient-preferred, and unimodal physician-assigned scents arms, none of the four interventions was associated with a significant improvement in olfaction, or with a difference between intervention arms or compared with no intervention, according to Jay Piccirillo, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and colleagues.