Health News and Information

Description and Possible Medical Problems

If you’ve been reaching for the salt shaker more often lately because food doesn’t seem to taste as good as it used to, you need to determine whether the change has been gradual or sudden.

A gradual loss of taste is probably due to the fact that you don’t have as many taste buds as you once did—and those that remain gradually lose their effectiveness. However, a noticeable loss of taste doesn’t usually occur until a person reaches the 70s or 80s, if at all. A vitamin deficiency—of zinc and/or vitamin B^—can also cause a gradual loss of taste. And habitual cigarette smoking is one of the most common causes of taste loss.

A sudden loss of taste is usually caused by a specific medical condition; it may be a sign of stroke, infection, or a tumor in the lung.

Treatment

There’s not much you can do if you find you’re gradually losing your sense of taste. Quitting smoking or taking zinc and/or vitamin B12 can help you to determine if these are responsible for your loss of taste. Taking a multivitamin with 100% of the RDA of all recommended vitamins and minerals each day will provide you with sufficient dosages of both zinc and vitamin B12.

However, if you suddenly lose your sense of taste, you should check for recent changes in your lifestyle or health. For instance, antihistamines are frequently responsible for reduced taste sensation, which is frequently accompanied by a dry mouth. And because taste is so closely related to smell, if you have a cold or an upper respiratory infection, you’ll probably lose some if not all of your sense of taste. Psychotropic medications that alter your consciousness—such as marijuana and cocaine—are another cause.

However, if none of these is the cause, you should check with your physician as soon as possible to determine what the cause is. Your doctor may give you a taste test to determine the kinds of tastes you can detect—sweet, salty, sour, and bitter—that is akin to a scratch-and-sniff test. He will place sugar, lemon, bitters, and salt on your tongue in order to determine what specific tastes you can detect.

After a thorough examination, if your physician determines that your taste loss is temporary, you should concentrate on selecting foods that give you at least some sensation of taste. Tangy, sweet, or spicy foods, along with foods that are crunchy or have some texture, will help alleviate the annoyance of not being able to taste your food. If, however, your doctor suspects that your loss of taste is due to an underlying illness, such as a stroke, he will probably order more tests to make a positive diagnosis and then begin treatment for the illness itself.

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Description and Possible Medical Problems

The majority of Americans believe that to have anything less than clean, minty breath 24 hours a day is something akin to sacrilege.

Of course, sweet-smelling breath is a real asset in life, but frequently, eliminating bad breath isn’t just a matter of brushing your teeth and gargling with mouthwash. After all, mints, toothpaste, and mouthwash will only partially mask bad breath that doesn’t respond to improved oral hygiene. Sometimes gingivitis, or gum disease, or a serious health problem such as lung, kidney, or liver disease or any mouth or throat infection is responsible for persistent halitosis. Most of the time, however, the problem can be solved easily with a simple change in diet.

Treatment

The first thing to check—and the easiest symptom to treat—is your oral hygiene habits. If you’re not brushing and flossing properly—or cleaning your dentures thoroughly each day—you should immediately start to pay closer attention to your dental routine. Advanced cases of gingivitis or gum disease can also cause persistent bad breath.

If you improve your dental hygiene program but you still have bad breath, you should give yourself a nutritional checkup, since, as you age, your digestive system can slow down considerably. And if you eat a lot of processed and refined foods—which take longer to digest than unte-fined foods do—the food can stay in your stomach longet and ferment, producing a noxious gas. Low-calorie diets ate notorious for causing bad breath, as ketones, a by-product of digestion, are produced by the digestion of excess protein and expelled through your mouth as a foul-smelling gas. If improving your diet doesn’t work, you may have a problem in your gastrointestinal tract, which is often responsible for releasing foul-smelling gas through the mouth.

Lung disease and its primary cause—cigarette smoking—can also cause bad breath that doesn’t go away with brushing and flossing. Other serious diseases, such as kidney or liver failure or diabetes, can also cause the breath to smell foul, as can any infection that occurs in your mouth or throat. If your bad breath has appeared suddenly and doesn’t respond to your own treatment, see your doctor to rule out these diseases as the cause. Over-the-counter cold remedies and antihistamines such as Benadryl and prescription medications, especially antidepressants such as Elavil and others that cause your mouth to become dry, can bring on bad breath since adequate saliva production helps to keep your breath fresh. Ask your doctor about switching to another medication.

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If you develop a painful rash along your ear—commonly known as shingles—then it’s safe to say that you had chicken pox as a kid.

Ramsay Hunt syndrome, a form of shingles that commonly appears along your ear, is a form of the herpes zoster virus, the same virus that causes chicken pox in children.

What causes the chicken pox virus suddenly to appear after years of latency? It’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint the culprit, but too much emotional and/or physical stress can often trigger the immune system to become depressed, which may “wake up” a latent virus. And people who have weakened immune systems are prone to repeated bouts with the virus—and attacks of shingles.

To find out if the rash on your ear means you are having your second bout with chicken pox, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do I have a painful rash or pimples on my outer ear?

2. Did I have chicken pox as a child?

3. Have I lost my sense of taste?

4. Am I sometimes unable to move one side of my face for short periods of time?

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For people who have presbyopia, bifocals—glasses with two different strengths of lenses in them—are the most common solution. The top half of the lens will help you see more clearly at a distance, while the bottom half will improve your reading as well as your ability to focus on objects you need to see up close. Nowadays, new types of bifocals are available in which there is no “line” between the upper and lower halves, so that no one can tell that you’re wearing bifocals.

However, as baby boomers can be as vain as I am when it comes to wearing glasses, there is hope in the form of contact lenses. Bausch & Lomb makes a special bifocal contact lens called Multifocal that is designed to be worn when you don’t want to wear glasses.

Unfortunately, ophthalmologists recommend that you increase the strength of your prescription every three to four years after the age of 40, since the lens of your eye will continue to become stiffer, which will ultimately alter your vision. Fortunately, eyesight stops deteriorating at about the age of 65, making further prescription upgrades unnecessary.

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If you are allergic to a particular substance, the first thing you should do is try to avoid the allergen. If it’s inside the house, open the windows; if the allergen is outside, keep your windows closed.

There are many over-the-counter preparations you can use in a variety of formulas, from pills and capsules to nasal sprays and eyedrops. A diphenhydramine hydrochloride preparation, such as Benadryl, or a chlorpheniramine maleate preparation, such as Chlortrimeton, helps

relieve the symptoms of allergy but causes drowsiness. If this is a problem, you should see your physician to find out about taking some of the new prescription allergy formulations that don’t cause drowsiness, such as Claritin, Hismanal, or Seldane. However, the latter medications tend to be less effective in treating your symptoms than the former are, so it’s your call.

In any case, if your allergy symptoms are particularly severe and include wheezing or shortness of breath, you should see your doctor because you may need to use a bronchodilator spray like Ventolin to help you breathe.

If you think you have hay fever but it’s accompanied by a yellow nasal discharge and head pain, you may actually have sinusitis, a sinus infection.

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