A study has found that people living with long Covid who suffer from loss of smell show different patterns of activity in certain regions of the brain. The study was published in the journal, 'EClinicalMedicine'. The research used MRI scanning to compare the brain activity of people with long Covid who lost their sense of smell, those whose smell had returned to normal after Covid infection, and people who had never tested positive for Covid-19.

The observational study found that people with long Covid smell loss had reduced brain activity and impaired communication between two parts of the brain which process important smell information: the orbitofrontal cortex and the pre-frontal cortex. This connection was not impaired in people who had regained their sense of smell after Covid.