Is sniffing someone else's BODY ODOUR the key to curing social anxiety? trends now

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 odour. 

The European experts obtained underarm sweat from volunteers and exposed it to patients while they were undergoing mindfulness therapy for social anxiety.

Anxiety was reduced by more than a third compared with the use of mindfulness therapy on its own, they found – but the reasons why are as yet unclear.  

It's already known that human body odour – commonly known as BO – triggers aggression in women but blocks aggression in men. 

The new study was led by Elisa Vigna at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and presented at the European Congress of Psychiatry in Paris this weekend.

'Our state of mind causes us to produce molecules, or chemo-signals, in sweat which communicate our emotional state and produce corresponding responses in the receivers,' she said.

'The results of our preliminary study show that combining these chemo-signals with mindfulness therapy seem to produce better results in treating social anxiety than can be achieved by mindfulness therapy alone.' 

According to Vigna, exposure to human odours extracted from other people's sweat might be used to boost treatment for some mental health problems.

'We are hopeful that this may lead to a new way of helping people with social anxiety disorder; for example increasing the effectiveness of standalone e-health interventions – such as meditation apps – or provide an additional opportunity for those who don’t respond to current treatment,' she said. 

For the study, Vigna and colleagues collected sweat samples from volunteers who were watching short clips from films in different genres.  

These films had been chosen to elicit particular emotional states such as fear or happiness, in order to see if the specific emotions experienced while perspiring had any effects on the results. 

Clips from 'fearful' movies included horror films such as The Grudge, while 'happy' clips included material from Mr Bean's Holiday and Sister Act.

Once the sweat had been collected, researchers recruited 48 women (aged between 15 and 35), all of whom suffered from social anxiety, and divided them into three groups each of 16 people.