Sniffing someone’s sweat could boost mental health, according to boffins

Catching a whiff of someone's sweat is enough to make you squirm.

But did you know smelling another person's bodily odour is actually good for you?

In fact, researchers found it's a useful way to give your mental health a boost.

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The Swedish scientists conducted experiments on peoples' armpit sweat to test the theory.

And the results found the smell can activate pathways in the brain linked to emotions which offer a calming outcome.

However, the studies are in their early stages and haven't yet reached a conclusion… so don't get ahead of yourselves!

According to the BBC, some of the team's early findings are set to be presented at a medical conference in Paris.

So before you start sniffing people at the gym or on the tube, the research is awaiting more conclusive proof first.

The Swedish scientists found the scent of a person's sweat might help communicate their emotional state.

They started by asking people to donate sweat from their armpits.

Next they got in 48 women with social anxiety who were willing to give the sweaty samples a good old sniff.

Some of the females were given actual samples of sweat, while others got the "placebo effect" from sniffing clean air.

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The results showed the socially anxious women who sniffed human sweat responded better to therapy.

Lead researcher Elisa Vigna, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, explained more sweat-related testing is to come.

She said: "Sweat produced while someone was happy had the same effect as someone who had been scared by a movie clip.

"So there may be something about human chemo-signals in sweat generally which affects the response to treatment.

"It may be that simply being exposed to the presence of someone else has this effect, but we need to confirm this.

"In fact, that is what we are testing now in a follow-up study with a similar design, but where we are also including sweat from individuals watching emotionally neutral documentaries."

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