Conference Presentation by Danny Kunz

Monday, April 23, 2018 Conference Presentation by Danny Kunz https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YryRbLVTJW9FXHg2R8pnaa1jHZJqH5uR/view As usual, Danny Kunz most graciously provided the MEBO community with a very informative PowerPoint presentation on the Causes of Body Odor. This PowerPoint was to be presented and discussed at length at the MEBO Annual Conference, Savannah, Georgia 2018. Since we did have some technical difficulties and we were unable to hear the video, I am now presenting it here. Discussion below on some points of interest that Danny tells us: Histamine in the gut is bad because it has a strong impact on tight junction regulation of intestinal cells. In fact, "fecal body odor seems to be related to histamine degradation deficiency" The significance of gut wall health (tight junction regulation of intestinal cells) was discussed in the conference. Sufferers are recommended to consult with their physician if they experience prolonged allergic reactions, especially of the bowels, such as food sensitivities and/or indigestion, etc. It is important to maintain good health of the digestive tract in the fight against odor conditions and PATM. Sufferers are recommended to consult with their gastroenterologist when experiencing any intestinal discomfort, including but not limited to, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, abdominal tenderness, painful bowel movement, hemorrhoids, rectal bleeding, etc. It looks like histamine concentrations are highly important for the tight junction regulation of intestinal cells. The tight junctions are important for the direct paracellular transport of electrolytes into the blood without transition through the intestinal cell metabolism. Increased open tight junctions [leaky gut] will further lead to an increased surface area of the intestinal cells [IBS] and are as a result, a strong regulator of passing amines and their level of being processed. http://bodyodorresearch.blogspot.com/2017/05/histamine-has-strong-impact-on-tight.html Clinical significance of the opening of intercellular tight junctions (increased intestinal permeability), any of which may result in opening of tight junction, resulting in the passing of electrolytes into the blood without transition through the intestinal cell metabolism. Clinical significance [Wikipedia] The opening of intercellular tight junctions (increased intestinal permeability) allows uncontrolled passage of substances into the bloodstream, with subsequent possible development of immune and/or inflammatory reactions.[3][8] The opening of intercellular tight junctions (increased intestinal permeability) can allow passage of microbes, microbial products, and foreign antigens into the mucosa and the body proper. This can result in activation of the immune system and secretion of inflammatory mediators.[12] Increased intestinal permeability is a factor in several diseases, such as Crohn's disease, celiac disease,[13] type 1 diabetes,[14]type 2 diabetes,[13] rheumatoid arthritis, spondyloarthropathies,[15] inflammatory bowel disease,[8][16] irritable bowel syndrome,[9]schizophrenia,[17][18] certain types of cancer,[8] obesity,[19] fatty liver,[20] atopy and allergic diseases,[14] among others. In the majority of cases, increased permeability develops prior to disease,[8] but the cause–effect relationship between increased intestinal permeability in most of these diseases is not clear.[16][21] For a clearer understanding of the above used terms, see illustration below: Transcellular route (pathway): The route through cells, as opposed to between the cells. Paracellular route: the route between cells Tight junction: A type of cell junction formed between epithelial cells of vertebrates wherein the outer layers of two adjacent cells fuse, thereby serving as a barrier to the passage of fluid between cells An informative site on Crohn's Disease: Verywell.com, a health & wellness site that provides simple, expert advice to 20M readers a month, https://www.verywellhealth.com/crohns-disease-4013910 ----------------------------- María María de la Torre Founder and Executive Director https://web.archive.org/web/20250821224117/https://www.meboblog.com/search/label/powerpoint https://web.archive.org/web/20251112182112/https://www.meboblog.com/

Microbes of anti-social odor

Human odors depend on many extrinsic (such as food or clothing) and intrinsic factors - localized or systemic. In recent years, microbes responsible for localized malodors - bad breath caused by oral bacteria and axillary odor - have been mapped by using next generation sequencing approaches. However, intestinal microbes responsible for systemic malodor (whole-body and extraoral halitosis), remain to be identified.

 Our preliminary analysis of culture-, PCR- and 16S-RNA-based data donated by MEBO and PATM community members show that there are no easy answers.

Unraveling the Mysteries of Mischievous Microbiome

Science explains why some people smell worse than others despite keeping themselves squeaky clean.


  
The body is crawling with microbes that have evolved with the person, depending on the innate metabolism, history of infections, microbiome swaps, diet and lifestyle. The body's ecosystem of microorganisms can increase the risk for dangerous diseases for which we have unreserved levels of sympathy. It can also lead to ​unlikable conditions such as unpredictable and embarrassing outbursts of odor emitting through the pores - odor so bad it ruins social lives and careers.

Let those who never smelled bad cast the first stone

Analysis of our metabolism is crucial to comprehending the responses of our genes and microbes to the stresses of daily life, and to elucidating the causes and consequences of health and disease.

We applied metabolomic approach to an elusive condition that has always evaded diagnosis: socially and psychologically distressing odors that occur without a known or apparent cause. Learn about our preliminary results and participate in our anonymous survey to help us better understand and help with this condition.

Giving the underserved the care they deserve

Nobody likes strong smells coming from other human beings. It's just that social convention: you are nice, if you smell nice, and you are a monster - like Shakespeare's Caliban - if you smell bad.

But it could be the brunt of the genetic or environmental misfortune

Seeing Through the Skin

by AURAMETRIX

​Human skin emits light (albeit the glow is extremely weak) and a wide variety of small molecules that may be sometimes "sniffed" by dogs or even other humans. These chemicals tell a story about our health and wellness, things we eat and drink, touch and breathe. Mosquitoes use such emissions to assess our "attractiveness" from indicators such as Indoles (unpleasantly smelling but healthy "inner soil" biomarker) or carbon dioxide (amount of which correlates with the size of the person producing it) in the air.  Sampling air for health indicators is much less invasive than drawing blood and could be an invaluable diagnostic tool. Many applications of gas sensors have been proposed over decades ranging from sweat patches to sensorized garments. Where are we now? What is the 2016 state of the art? Last month, BACtrack won 1st Prize in “Wearable Alcohol Sensor Challenge” Issued by National Institutes of Health. Milo Sensors, employing a different approach to identify ethanol molecules diffusing through the skin, won 2nd prize. BACtrack Skyn will be available in limited quantities later this year, marking an important step from bulky alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelets remotely monitoring offenders to inconspicuous devices. Perhaps, one day, drug patches, too, won't require sending them to a lab for analysis. Human skin is a super-highway of many small molecules reflecting our health and wellbeing. Various devices capable of "seeing" through our skin were announced in the past several years. Some of them - like AIRO watch claiming to detect metabolites in your bloodstream as they are released during and after meals - turned out to be vaporware. The jury is still out on many others like HealbeGobe. And the remaining ones are still in prototyping stages.  EU-funded Biotex textiles and Perspiration Detective patch development at the University of Cincinnati started from detecting sodium ions in sweat as indicators of hydration levels. A tattoo-like electronic sweat sensor built by a team in UCSD demonstrated that measuring a change in lactate might be sufficient to find when an athlete is about to “hit the wall.” Startup Electrozyme, later renamed to Biolinq, was formed to commercialize this technology. The picture shows their prototype of a skin-applied electrochemical sensor that analyses body fluids to provide actionable health information. The goal is to develop temporary tattoo biosensors providing blood level info without accessing blood. Halo Wearables will launch their non-invasive hydration monitoring wearable in early 2016. It is tailored specifically for elite athletes.  Halo's optical sensors track sodium and potassium levels in the user's blood. ​ Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have also developed a wearable sensor that can monitor sodium, potassium and lactate levels in sweat. A paper with their findings was published in Nature earlier this year. ​ Startup Xsensio, accepted this year in Mass Challenge accelerator, works on “intelligent stamps” the size of a credit card (Lab-on-Skin wearables) including a unique low-power sensor for sweat analysis. ECHO smart patch from Kenzen aims to "silently follow your health and notify you only when it's most important". It analyzes sodium and potassium in sweat to monitor hydration, lactic acid and glucose analysis energy expenditure.  Existing technologies can detect a general increase or decrease in metabolites rather exact concentrations. So using sweat to accurately monitor clinically important variables such as glucose levels, is still out of reach. But developers are employing innovative approaches to make it possible. A team from Seoul National University, University of Texas and a Massachusetts-based company MC10 are developing a flexible patch that senses glucose in people with diabetes and administers drugs, all in a single device. And there may be easier ways to display all the information collected from various sensors -  perhaps even directly on the body - as the team from the University of Tokyo demonstrated with device measuring oxygen saturation levels in blood. ​We've come a long way from bulky and invasive medical equipment that required the patient to remain in the hospital for monitoring. We have made a lot of progress from the times when all symptoms and signs were recorded with a pencil and paper. There is still a lot more to do before real-time self-managing noninvasive diagnostics reaches a breakthrough, but we are so much closer.

REFERENCES


Andreoni G, Standoli CE, & Perego P (2016). Defining Requirements and Related Methods for Designing Sensorized Garments. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 16 (6) PMID: 27240361

Gao W, Emaminejad S, Nyein HY, Challa S, Chen K, Peck A, Fahad HM, Ota H, Shiraki H, Kiriya D, Lien DH, Brooks GA, Davis RW, & Javey A (2016). Fully integrated wearable sensor arrays for multiplexed in situ perspiration analysis. Nature, 529 (7587), 509-14 PMID: 26819044

Imani S, Bandodkar AJ, Mohan AM, Kumar R, Yu S, Wang J, & Mercier PP (2016). A wearable chemical-electrophysiological hybrid biosensing system for real-time health and fitness monitoring. Nature communications, 7 PMID: 27212140

Lee H, Choi TK, Lee YB, Cho HR, Ghaffari R, Wang L, Choi HJ, Chung TD, Lu N, Hyeon T, Choi SH, & Kim DH (2016). A graphene-based electrochemical device with thermoresponsive microneedles for diabetes monitoring and therapy. Nature nanotechnology, 11 (6), 566-72 PMID: 26999482

Panneer Selvam A, Muthukumar S, Kamakoti V, & Prasad S (2016). A wearable biochemical sensor for monitoring alcohol consumption lifestyle through Ethyl glucuronide (EtG) detection in human sweat. Scientific reports, 6 PMID: 26996103
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Yokota T, Zalar P, Kaltenbrunner M, Jinno H, Matsuhisa N, Kitanosako H, Tachibana Y, Yukita W, Koizumi M, & Someya T (2016). Ultraflexible organic photonic skin. Science advances, 2 (4) PMID: 27152354

The Smell of Stress and Fear

Can we recognize if people around us are stressed, anxious or fearful without observing their facial expressions, body language and actions or hearing their voice and messages? Can we understand if we are stressed ourselves without assessing our heart rate, blood pressure, noticing dry throat, sweating, drops or surges in energy? Yes, we can - by using our nose - as humans, too, recognize and transmit their emotions through chemical senses.

When we are stressed or panic we become more sensitive to odors (Buróna et al., 2015), ranking neutral odors as unpleasant (Krusemark et al, 2013). Chronic stress will actually dull the senses (Yuan & Slotnick, 2013), but that's another story.

When other people are stressed, we can feel it without seeing or hearing them. Numerous experiments showed that we can recognize emotions from sweat alone. We might not be able to tell why, but experience sympathy by smelling odors of those taking exams vs just exercising on a bike (Prehn-Kristensen et al 2009), become more cooperative when smelling hard work, more submissive when detecting that other people's health status prioritizes their needs, more fearful when detecting chemical clues coming from people watching horror movies (Zhou and Chen, 2009, de Groot et al., 2012) and exhibit risk taking behavior when detecting other people's anxieties (Haegler et al, 2010).

What is the exact chemistry of stress, anxiety and fear? We are getting close to deciphering it. Stress, for example, might be recognized by six biomarkers, including indole and 2-methyl-pentadecane (Turner et al, 2013) that are also indicators of COPD (Martinez-Lozano Sinues et al, 2014) and heart disease. 

Correlating chemicals to health and wellness conditions is not easy. Acetone in breath, for example, has attracted the interest of clinical researchers for more than 60 years. Several dozen independent studies using various techniques and methods showed that much more complex analysis is required with long-term measurements of various health and environmental indicators including diet, treatments and prior medical history (Dowlaty, Yoon, and Galassetti, 2013). Aurametrix provides an integrated platform for such analysis, but until we sift through all the data, if you are stressed out, just take a deep breath and relax. Inhale confidence, exhale doubt.

REFERENCES

Haegler, K., Zernecke, R., Kleemann, A., Albrecht, J., Pollatos, O., Brückmann, H., & Wiesmann, M. (2010). No fear no risk! Human risk behavior is affected by chemosensory anxiety signals Neuropsychologia, 48 (13), 3901-3908 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.09.019

Prehn-Kristensen A, Wiesner C, Bergmann TO, Wolff S, Jansen O, Mehdorn HM, Ferstl R, & Pause BM (2009). Induction of empathy by the smell of anxiety. PloS one, 4 (6) PMID: 19551135

Dowlaty N, Yoon A, & Galassetti P (2013). Monitoring states of altered carbohydrate metabolism via breath analysis: are times ripe for transition from potential to reality? Current opinion in clinical nutrition and metabolic care, 16 (4), 466-72 PMID: 23739629

de Groot JH, Smeets MA, Kaldewaij A, Duijndam MJ, & Semin GR (2012). Chemosignals communicate human emotions. Psychological science, 23 (11), 1417-24 PMID: 23019141

Krusemark EA, Novak L, Gitelman D, Li W. (2013) When the sense of smell meets emotion: Anxiety-state-dependent olfactory processing and neural circuitry adaptation. Journal of Neuroscience. 33(39):15324 –15332.

Martinez-Lozano Sinues P, Meier L, Berchtold C, Ivanov M, Sievi N, Camen G, Kohler M, Zenobi R Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. Respiration; International Review of Thoracic Diseases [2014, 87(4):301-310] PMID: 25545545

Yuan TF, Slotnick BM. Roles of olfactory system dysfunction in depression. (2014) Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry. 54:26-30. doi: 10.1016/j.pnpbp.2014.05.013.