Hundreds of chemicals are released from our bodies into the air every second. These chemicals are easily released into the air because they have a high vapor pressure, which means they boil and turn into gases at room temperature. These vapors give clues to who we are and how healthy we are.
One written for ‘The Conversation’ website topic “We’ve known since the ancient Greeks that when we’re sick we emit different smells,” says Auf Moran, Associate Professor at Dublin City University. Although today we rely on blood analysis, ancient Greek physicians used smell to diagnose diseases.
If they took a whiff of your breath and described it as fatty hepaticus (i.e. damaged liver), it meant you could be progressing to liver disease.
If a person’s poop was sweet or fruity, doctors thought it meant that the sugars in the digestive system weren’t being broken down and that the person might have diabetes. Science has since proved that the ancient Greeks were right – many other diseases, including liver failure, diabetes and infectious diseases, leave your breath with a distinctive smell.
In 1971, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling counted 250 different gaseous chemicals in breath. These gaseous chemicals are called volatile organic compounds or VOCs.
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Since Pauling’s discovery, other scientists have discovered hundreds more VOCs in human breath. We have learned that many of these VOCs have specific odors, but some do not, which our noses can perceive.
Scientists believe that VOCs have odors that our noses can detect or not, which can provide information about how healthy a person is.
A Scottish man was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease by his wife, retired nurse Joy Milner, when she became convinced that his sense of smell had changed.
This discovery led to research programs involving Joy Milner to identify the exact smell of the disease.
Dogs can smell more diseases than humans because their sense of smell is more sophisticated, but techniques such as analytical tools mass spectrometry pick up even more subtle changes in VOC profiles associated with intestinal, skin and respiratory diseases. Also associated with neurological diseases like Parkinson’s.
Researchers believe that some diseases will one day be diagnosed just by breathing into a device.
Where do VOCs come from?
Breath is not the only source of VOCs in the body. They are also excreted through the skin, urine and feces.
VOCs are the millions of skin glands that remove metabolic waste from the body, as well as waste products from bacteria and other germs that live on our skin.
Sweat produces additional nutrients for these bacteria to metabolize, which can result in particularly smelly VOCs. The smell of sweat makes up only a small portion of the smell coming from VOCs.
Our skin and our gut microbiomes are also made up of a delicate balance of these microbes. Scientists believe they influence our health, but we still don’t understand much about how this relationship works.
Unlike the gut, skin is relatively easy to study – you can collect skin samples from living humans without going deep into the body.
Scientists believe that skin VOCs can provide information about how the bacteria in the microbiome and the human body work together to maintain our health and protect us from disease.
Research is underway to determine whether skin VOCs can reflect the different characteristics of a person, to which they relate. Signals in skin VOC signatures may be that dogs distinguish between people by smell.
We’re at a relatively early stage in this research area, but we’ve shown that you can tell women and men apart based on how acidic VOCs are to the skin. We use mass spectrometry to detect this because the average human nose is not sophisticated enough to detect these VOCs.
We can also predict a person’s age with reasonable accuracy from their skin VOC profile within a few years. It is not surprising that oxidative stress increases in our body as we age.
Oxidative stress occurs when your antioxidant levels are low and causes irreversible damage to our cells and organs. Recent research has found byproducts of this oxidative damage in skin VOC profiles.
Not only are these VOCs responsible for personal odor, but they are used as communication channels by plants, insects, and animals. Plants are in constant VOC dialogue with other organisms including progenitors, herbivores, other plants and their natural enemies such as harmful bacteria and insects. The VOCs used for this back-and-forth communication are known as pheromones.
What does science say about love pheromones?
There is good evidence in animals that VOCs can act as comedic agents. Rats, for example, have germs, which contribute to a particularly odorous compound called trimethylamine, which allows rats to confirm the species of a potential mate. Pigs and elephants also have sex pheromones.
It is possible that humans also produce VOCs to attract their mates. Scientists have not yet fully decoded the VOCs emitted by skin or our bodies, but so far the evidence for human love pheromones is more and more controversial.
One theory suggests that these were lost around 23 million years ago when primates developed full color vision and began to rely on their better vision to choose mates.
However, it is believed that whether human pheromones are present or not, skin VOCs can reveal who and how they are, especially in relation to things like aging, nutrition and fitness, fertility and even stress levels. according to. This signature may include these factors, which we can use to monitor our health and diagnose disease.
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2024-08-07 12:51:57