In response to a query about anosmia, Stephen Black posted the following to the Teaching in the Psychological Sciences discussion group in February of 1998.

I don't have much, but here it is. From Freedman (1993):

"More than 2 million Americans suffer from a significant loss of their ability to smell...Anosmia can be caused by a gene defect, by aging, by viral infections and allergies, or, inadvertently, by certain prescription drugs. Most commonly it occurs after a head trauma, when the jarring of the brain shears off the delicate axons running from the olfactory neurons to the brain through a bony plate in the skull. In many such cases the axons grow back, restoring smell, but the condition can be permanent."

I also have a flyer for the Handbook of Olfaction and Gustation (1994, ed. R. Doty) with a large section under olfaction headed "Clinical Applications and Perspectives". At $225 US, it was too pricey for our library, but if I had anosmia, I'd certainly want to check it out.

Reference: Freedman, D. (1993). In the realm of the chemical. Discover, 69--

Stephen Black, Ph.D.,Department of Psychology, Bishop's University, Lennoxville, QC, Canada

Now if you consider hyposmia (loss of the sense of smell, but not necessarily complete), the numbers go up. According to M. Levy and R. I. Henkin (Why should neuroradiologists study patients with smell loss, AJNR, American Journal of Neuroradiology, 2003, 24, 556-558), 19 million people in the U.S. suffer from chronic smell loss.

A Korean study (2013) indicated that 4.5% of their population suffer from subjective olfactory dysfunction.  It is much higher in older people (Dong et al., 2017), especially among black folk.

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This page most recently revised on 27-July-2018.