News & Views on Systemic Body Odor and Halitosis such as trimethylaminuria TMAU. If you have fecal odors or bowel odors it may be metabolic/systemic

31 July 2016

Metabolomic Profiling for Systemic Body Odor

This post is meant to be thought provoking.

Need to discover all volatiles/metabolites that cause systemic body odor.
Once discovered, these volatiles will be known as the biomarkers for the diagnostic test,

Trimethylaminuria (TMAU) was 'discovered' in 1970 by Denver Dr's. A patient's mother had said sometimes their child smelt of fish (they had another serious disorder) and the Drs decided to test the TMA level since they knew this volatile smells of fish.

So the only volatile currently tested for systemic/metabolic body odor came about in an anecdotal case and no-one has looked any further than this since (that's if they even look for TMA). It goes to show how much 'sufferers' need to further the understanding of systemic body odor themselves, as no-one is looking.

Personally I think maybe 1% population could be 'prone' to  transient systemic body odor, probably 'fecal body odor'. Maybe even more. I would guess it may well be the biggest 'undiscovered' metabolic disorder left.

Metabolome Testing
It's only about 18 years since the FMO3 enzyme DNA code was fully documented. So genetics is still at a fairly new stage. Along with genetics, the other science that compliments it is human metabolomics, the study of the metabolites in humans. Again this is a fairly new science, both in knowledge and the technology needed. It does seem to be maturing now.

Metabolomics for understanding systemic body odor
When a disorder is fully understood it will have a 'phenotype' test where they look for the known biomarkers in human fluid to see if the person has the disorder. Since the concept of systemic body odor has not been documented, it will currently need a test like an exploratory metabolome test to look for higher levels of metabolites (probably volatiles). Once they document the biomarkers for systemic body odor, you can then use these biomarkers as the 'disorder test'.

How to do a Metabolome test
First you need to make sure it will look for the 'suspect' metabolites. In the case of SBO, these will probably be sulfide volatiles, but I wouldn't rule anything out for now. I would guess most labs would do a very broad spectrum exploratory test.

examples of 'suspect' volatiles I would look for in systemic body odor :
dimethylsulfide
dimethyldisulfide
methanethiol

Personally I would be looking at FMO3 substrates, as I reckon this enzyme may be to blame for the biggest group of SBO sufferers.

Ease of testing
Since it's a new science, I am unsure of how many labs do metabolomic testing. It's probably not a regular in the mainstream medical health industry (e.g hospitals). Probably more a test done at University labs where trends for testing probably start off.

Also, as usual most labs will probably insist only a Dr can order the test. The usual obstacle to testing used in the medical health industry. Hopefully someday the law will change to allow people to self-pay any test.

Testing Centers :    
Looking around I am not aware of too many potential test centers. A quick google search came up with these possible leads :
Uni of Alberta
Baylor Clinic
Human Metabolome Technologies (Boston)  

The system :
I would say at the moment, expect the system to be against you.


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Update Aug 17 :
Genos is back with it's EXOME test
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Note :
Exome/Genome testing may be better option than single gene testing.

See this post : link

Note : Genos Exome Testing.

Exome testing is almost the same price now as single gene testing. Also Genos is consumer friendly, which standard DNA labs are not.

So the blog offer to test solely for FMO3 is almost obsolete, and so no longer offered.


Does Genos fully sequence FMO3 gene ?

At the moment it is not clear, but hoped this will become clear over the next few months

Note : possible 'wild west' way of testing FMO3
Use an ancestry dna site and rummage through the raw data

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