Acetone aroma points to diabetes, raw fish smell points to liver disease, doctors say that every disease can be diagnosed according to the breath smell.
Doctors claim that some diseases can be diagnosed with the help of the smell only. They say that diabetes patients breath reminds to acetone, while those that have liver problems have breath that reminds of fish.
If bad smell is not strong enough for people to notice, it can be felt with so-called “electronic noses”.
American researchers also claim that when there is an infection of the bowel, the urine can smell like ammoniac, while the sweat smell with rubella in the organism can remind to the smell of freshly plucked feathers.
Sweat of schizophrenics can remind of vinegar, with typhus, the smell of the skin is like the one of freshly baked bread, while yellow fever patients have skin that smells like the smell when you enter a butcher shop and infection of the lymph knots causes smell like the one of old beer.
Besides, it was discovered that men can smell breast cancer and that are equally as efficient as mammograms.
Which animals can smell disease?
Since dogs have exceptionally developed sense of smell, they are currently being tested to be able to discover ovarian cancer. One patient that took a part in the study said that she “smelled” the cancer herself.
One forum user, Jenny, wrote that while her husband suffered from prostate cancer, and she had lung cancer herself, she could sense the smell of decay.
It was this smell that made her go to the doctor, and after all the exams she did, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. After she was cured, the smell was completely gone.
Doctor George Pretti from the “Monell Chemical Senses” center in Philadelphia claims that he had numerous examples when patients sensed their cancer, exclusively because of the bad smell they felt.
This discovery is considered as revolutionary for the future medicine, not only for curing cancer but also for curing other diseases.
Pretti deals with specific diseases like ovarian cancer and he says that this disease is especially hard to diagnose, and consequently the mortality rate it causes is quite high.
According to Pretti’s words, the body produces chemicals as a result of the metabolism work, but the cancer cells have different metabolism which results in emitting different chemicals which cause different smell.
That smell is very subtle for people to feel it, but dogs have been trained for a longer period of time to help in diagnosing of diseases like cancer and diabetes.
As a result of that, Dr. Pretti now collaborates with “Penn Vet Working Dog” center, to train dogs in recognizing cancer smell.
How precisely can dogs determine the disease?
Supposedly, trained dogs were in condition to discover this disease in 90% of the cases, which contributed in decrease of the mortality rate.
Dogs however aren’t the only creatures able to detect cancer. Scientists believe that midges too have this ability.
Researchers from the Constance University in Germany came to a conclusion that cancer smell causes a certain activity to flies and midges, but this hasn’t been clearly yet.
They hope that midges will help in discovering this dangerous disease.
Test conducted with the help of apparatus called “electronic nose”, shows us the possibility of discovering breast cancer by the breath smell.
This apparatus publishes the first results after only 10 minutes, which represents one more revolution for the whole medicinal branch, and with discovering the disease on time, patients wouldn’t have to be exposed to harmful roentgen rays.
