Monitoring Metabolic Status and Disease Recognition

When reading the section of this book entitled, ‘Messages in Body Odor’ written by the Institute of Medicine of the [US] National Academies, it brings to mind that it might be precisely the analysis of our odor that would lead the experts to diagnose the causes of our body odor condition. The section, ‘Disease Recognition’ discusses how dogs and mice’s sense of smell can detect metabolic diseases such as diabetes, scurvy and gout.

This book also discusses two studies that investigate the ability of humans to communicate emotions, or psychological state, through body odor. It also points out how the use of body odor emits chemical signals that can be used to recognize the individual identity of other members of the same species.

Throughout history physicians have used body odor to diagnose metabolic diseases (e.g., diabetes, scurvy, and gout) and infectious diseases (e.g., smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever) (see Penn and Potts, 1998a). There are also anecdotal account of dogs’ abilities to detect human skin cancers before overt symptoms of the disease were present (Church and Williams, 2001). These observations need to be confirmed with rigorous experimental study.

Nevertheless, female mice could discriminate between parasitized male and healthy males (Kavaliers and Colwell, 1992) and showed less attract5ion to the odor of male mice infected with intestinal parasites than they did to healty controls (Kavaliers and Colwell, 1995)…

Yamazaki and colleagues (2002) studied the ability of mice to discriminate the urine odor of other mice experiementally infected with mouse mammary tumor virus (MMTV), a B-type retrovirus that is tightly linked to immune responses…

books.google.com: Monitoring Metabolic Status By Institute of Medicine (U.S.). Committee on Metabolic Monitoring for Military Field Applications, Institute of Medicine