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Some of the more conventional treatments for anxiety include psychotherapy, medication, and self-help.
But researchers have now proposed a slightly more gruesome alternative: sniffing someone else’s body odor.
The European experts obtained armpit sweat from volunteers and exposed it to patients while undergoing mindfulness therapy for social anxiety.
Anxiety was reduced by more than a third compared to using mindfulness therapy alone, they found — but the reasons why are still unclear.
It is already known that human body odor—commonly known as BO—causes aggression in women, but blocks aggression in men.
Human body odors are thought to convey important social signals, thanks to a unique and complex mix of molecules. A group of European researchers has shown that exposure to human odors, extracted from other people’s sweat, can be used to boost the treatment of certain mental health problems (file photo)
The new study was led by Elisa Vigna of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and was presented this weekend at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris.
“Our mood causes us to produce molecules or chemosignals in sweat that communicate our emotional state and produce corresponding responses in the receivers,” she said.
“The results of our preliminary study show that combining these chemosignals with mindfulness therapy appears to yield better results in the treatment of social anxiety than can be achieved with mindfulness therapy alone.”
According to Vigna, exposure to human odors extracted from other people’s sweat can be used to boost treatment for some mental health issues.
‘We hope this can lead to a new way of helping people with social phobia; for example, increasing the effectiveness of standalone e-health interventions — such as meditation apps — or providing an additional opportunity for those who are not responding to current treatment,” she said.
For the study, Vigna and colleagues collected sweat samples from volunteers who were watching short clips from movies in various genres.
These films were chosen to elicit certain emotional states, such as fear or happiness, to see if the specific emotions experienced while perspiring had any effect on the results.
Clips from ‘terrifying’ films include horror films such as The Grudge, while ‘happy’ clips include material from Mr Bean’s Holiday and Sister Act.
After the sweat was collected, researchers recruited 48 women (aged 15 to 35), all of whom suffered from social anxiety, and divided them into three groups of 16 people each.
Over a two-day period, they all underwent mindfulness therapy for social anxiety, which generally includes meditation, relaxation, and awareness exercises.
At the same time, each group was exposed to a different odor obtained from the sweat samples of people who had watched different types of video clips, plus a control group, which was exposed to clean air.
Individuals who underwent one mindfulness therapy session and were exposed to human body odors showed a reduction of about 39 percent in anxiety scores, the team found,
In comparison, the group that only received mindfulness – the control group – had only a 17 percent lower anxiety score after one treatment session.
But the type of movie watched had no effect on the results.
“We found that the women in the group who were exposed to sweat from people who watched funny or scary movies responded better to mindfulness therapy than those who weren’t exposed,” Vigna said.
“We were a little surprised to find that the emotional state of the person who caused the sweat did not differ in treatment outcomes – sweat produced while someone was happy had the same effect as someone frightened by a movie clip.”
“So there may be something about human chemo signals in sweat in general that influences response to treatment.”
Vigna emphasizes that this is a proof-of-concept study, so they are now embarking on a larger study to confirm the findings.
Social anxiety is a common mental health condition in which people become overly concerned about participating in social situations (file photo)
They also collaborate with University of Pisa analysts who have been able to identify more than 300 separate compounds in human sweat.
The researchers hope that if they can identify and isolate the molecules that cause the effects seen in the study.
In 2021, researchers focused on one point chemical compound found in BO called hexadecanal (HEX) and its effects on the human brain.
Unlike many of the compounds in body odor, HEX has no detectable odor to humans, but it can probably be sensed by all mammals – and it’s found in abundance on the heads of newborn babies.
The researchers found that HEX reduces connectivity in parts of the brain that regulate social decision-making in women – including the decision to become aggressive – while in men it increases this connectivity.
Thousands of years ago, as an evolutionary aid, HEX on a baby’s head probably suppressed aggression in males, making them less likely to harm the child.