Your body odour can reveal secrets about your health -The Standard Health

Your body odour can reveal secrets about your health (Photo: iStock)

We emit a barrage of smelly chemicals through our pores and in our breath. In most cases, what we emit is innocuous and mostly related to our cleanliness and grooming. But some odours are a sign that we might be getting ill, and could be used to diagnose several diseases. A new smell may indicate that something has changed in your body.

Can diseases have a noticeable impact on our sense of smell? To stay alive, our bodies must continually convert food and drink into energy. It does this through a series of chemical reactions in our cells that convert sugars from our food into energy our body can use. These chemical reactions produce molecules which can easily evaporate and potentially be picked up by our noses. Having a disease can change the specific molecules produced, altering our body odour fingerprint.

Some diseases can trigger a strong characteristic smell that most humans will be able to detect. The breath or skin of people with poorly controlled diabetes can produce a fruity aroma due to the build-up of fruity-smelling acidic chemicals called ketones. Some infectious diseases also give off characteristic smells. Sweet-smelling poo could be a sign of infection with cholera, which is a common cause of diarrhoea. Tuberculosis can cause a person’s breath to smell foul, like stale beer. People with liver disease can emit a musty or sulphurous odour from their breath or urine, while if your breath smells of ammonia or has a fishy aroma, this could be a sign of kidney disease.

Health scientists have been working on techniques for systematically detecting smelly biomarkers that could speed up diagnoses of several conditions, ranging from brain conditions to cancer. Some advances have been made with the use of AI to aid specific detection of telltale smells. Such technology is necessary as relatively few people have noses powerful enough to detect these telltale biochemicals that crop up in the early stages of a disease.

Dogs continue to play a role in disease detection, too. You see, dogs have a sense of smell that is reportedly up to 100,000 times stronger than ours. Scientists have trained canines to sniff out lung, breast, ovarian, bladder and prostate cancers in people. Dogs have also been trained to detect early signs of Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, oncoming epileptic seizures, and malaria. All from specific smelly signals alone.

Among other telltale signs of disease, you must stay vigilant about the kinds of smells you notice within yourself and others. If the smell doesn’t feel right, it will mostly be nothing. But it could well be something else that warrants additional scrutiny.