Diseases have various smells
It is easy to understand that a person is sick with the flu, going into the room where he lies, by the smell of stolen sweat, coughing and human suffering. But is it possible to determine various diseases only by the smell emanating from a person? Scientists say that it is possible, and the smells of many diseases have already been described.
So, for example, schizophrenia has its characteristic smell, this is due to a change in metabolism. It is possible to train rats to distinguish between schizophrenics by smell: it is published in patients and generated with later trans-3-methyl-2 hexenic acid. This smell is described as the “smell of overripe sweet fruits”.
In patients with cystic fibrosis, not sweat smells, but breathing – a sour smell. The “aromas” have diseases of the kidneys, liver and digestive organs, since they are responsible (including) for the purification of blood, and when these organs are affected in the blood, components appear in the blood that should not be there. Some of them have a smell. For example, the smell of fish, when the body cannot learn choline contained in food and accumulates a substance called trimethylamin.
People who worked in hospitals during outbreaks of epidemics can also describe the smells of some diseases. Diphtheria has a sweet smell, diseases of the abdominal cavity – the smell of freshly baked bread, one of the forms of tuberculosis – the smell of beer. Small children with metabolic disorders can smell so hard with maple syrup so much that this condition received the name “maple syrup disease” in the USA.
Of course, people are not able to distinguish these smells well, but this can be trained animals: for example, dogs. Determination of the type of disease or at least a affected organ at an early stage of diagnosis, even before analyzes, could significantly facilitate the task of the doctor. Perhaps in the future, medicine will really begin to resort to such practice everywhere.