Arun speaks to us about his past studies and current scientific study of BO

After presenting three case studies, our scientist Arun Nagrath states his opinion about the causes of halitosis. He asks us to please participate in his questionnaire which will end soon. You can access the questionnaire at: http://www.tmau.shareaflat.net/ [questionnaire is closed now]

All the results will then be compiled and analysed and feed back to the group, and will be used by him and the consultant specialist in metabolic medicine who is working with him on this, to draw up a more refined scientific study. Arun presents three case studies in this write-up:

Subject 1: has secondary Trimethylaminuria and tongue plaque and gets continuous faecal breath, which she can taste and smell, and has no body odour.
Subject 2: has continuous faecal breath and body odour that varies with diet. This subject tested negative for TMAU, has tongue plaque, and can't taste or smell my breath
Subject 3: has tested negative for Trimethylaminuria, has intermittent faecal breath (which may come 2 hours after eating?), can't taste or smell her breath odour, and has no body odour.

…we don't all have the same symptoms but there seems to be a common metabolic pathway which is defective! I believe that for many of us who suffer halitosis on these sites, the actual origin of the odour is a site far removed from the mouth!! (my own belief is that there is some intestinal involvement). I believe the odorous chemical is passed round the body in the blood stream and is excreted from the lungs (these people will not have tongue plaque) or in the breath (these people will have tongue plaque) or in the undearms etc (if there is no breath odour there will be no tongue plaque). I believe the tongue plaque, where present, will act upon the already smelly metabolites excreted in the saliva making them even smellier.

As many of you know, we are running a questionnaire for odour sufferers in conjunction with a consultant specialist in metabolic medicine. Soon the survey will end and all the results will be compiled and analysed and fed back to the group. I will then be introducing my CASE STUDIES investigation which will look in a very detailed way at each and every one of your odour conditions. Each participant will enter their detailed odour information into a database on a website which will be linked to this one. In this way, you will also be able to look at everyone else's case (what affects their odour, what helped etc) as we go along! The aim of this exercise will be to try to elucidate what helps your particular breath or body odour condition because this is where I am going with the case study investigations.

At the moment nobody is in a better position to research what helps most of us than we ourselves! I hope you will all participate in the case studies because each case is just part of a jigsaw and when we have all the cases together we will have completed the jigsaw and finally made the condition researchable for scientists. At the moment, these conditions are difficult to research scientifically using analytical chemistry etc. I believe this is because we are dealing with a collection of different enzyme-related conditions each producing different symptoms but nevertheless sharing the same metabolic pathway.

Arun

Full write-up on the: MSN groups Body Odor forum

http://mpdela.blogspot.com/2008/07/scientific-questionnaire.html

http://www.tmau.shareaflat.net/