Taste dysfunction can significantly impact your health and quality of life. The ability to perceive sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and brothy sensations is not only important for eating and nutrition, but also for preparing your digestive system to properly digest the foods that you eat.

People can have various types of taste dysfunction. Hypogeusia is the reduced ability to detect sweet, sour, bitter, or salty sensations. Ageusia is the complete loss of the ability to taste. Dysgusia is a change in the normal perception of taste, such as distortion of familiar tastes, or when something that normally tastes pleasant changes to tasting bad. Phantogusia is the sensation of taste that is not present (similar to a hallucination). An example of phantogusia is the experience of a strong salty taste when nothing is in the mouth.

The following list includes some of the underlying causes. It is important to be evaluated with medical tools to understand these causes. Some of these medical tools include electrogustometry and sampling strips of paper with various concentrations of different tastes.

• Aging
• Viruses such as ones which cause Bell’s Palsy
• Oral Cancers
• Hormonal disturbances
• Exposure to pesticides, insecticides, or solvents
• Medications, such as blood pressure medications
• Radiation for treatment of head and neck cancers

Both taste and smell disorders are diagnosed by medical professionals.  Click the search button below to find a practitioner to determine the extent of your smell or taste disorder.