Taste dysfunction: a practical guide for oral medicine

Dental practitioners are often the first clinicians to be presented with complaints about changes in taste. This raises a problem in terms of appropriate evaluative response. It is a difficult issue both because of the common confusion between smell and taste problems (with smell being the more vulnerable sense and contributing substantially to the flavor of food that most patients equate with 'taste'), and because of the lack of widely accepted standardized techniques to assess true taste function. This brief review provides a summary of some of the problems associated with assessing taste function in a clinical setting and of patient management options available to the practitioner of oral medicine.