Adding Insult to Injury: Five Diseases That Cause Bad Breath
Imagine that you’re seriously ill, and a loved one comes out of the goodness of their heart to keep you company.
You lean over to whisper, weakly, into their ear just how much you appreciate it. When your mouth creaks open, however, what wafts out is the furthest thing from a thank you imaginable. Instead, it’s a dense cloud of powerful stink.
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Unfortunately, with certain ailments, halitosis is a uniquely obnoxious symptom, though weirdly one that’s mostly other people’s problem. In fact, here are five diseases that can cause awful breath…
Liver Disease
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The liver acts as a filter for unpleasant substances that your body neither needs nor wants, which is exactly why you can break it by drinking medically devastating amounts of alcohol. Whether that’s what caused the sickness, or you’re a teetotaler dealt a horrible hand, the fact remains that your liver can’t filter much out anymore.
One of the things that now slips right by is sulfuric compounds, which instead stick around your body until eventually exiting via your mouth in something known as fetor hepaticus.
If you’re thinking, that name doesn’t seem like it smells good, you’re right. The odor is compared to a mixture of rotten eggs and garlic.
Kidney Disease
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Like the liver, your kidneys do work filtering waste. One specific bit of inner-body trash kidneys take out is urea, which comes out in your, you guessed it, urine. Except, of course, if your kidneys aren’t working. In that case, they’re not able to bounce all that urea out the back door. Your body can’t abide to let urea swim around inside you, so it expels it in a different way — through your breath.
If you’ve been taking notes, you might be able to guess what that all equals out to: breath that smells remarkably like pungent urine.
Untreated Diabetes
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To be clear, simply being a diabetic doesn’t mean someone’s blasting stink. If it’s treated responsibly and kept under control, your breath should smell just fine. Where things get a little more malodorous is when a diabetic goes into ketoacidosis. This is when the body starts breaking down fats for energy, producing ketones, which, unfortunately, don’t smell all that great. Specifically, breath heavy with ketones smells like rotten apples or nail polish remover.
If you have a friend or significant other that’s tried the keto diet, their breath might have been nose-wrinkling for the same reasons.
Bowel Obstruction
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A bowel obstruction can also lead to horrible breath, and for reasons so obvious they seem borderline unscientific. That reason you just thought of, and then immediately dismissed because “surely that’s not how it works”? I regret to inform you it is. Since none of the trapped waste, or the odors it produces, can make their way out using the usual exit, the smells instead waft back up and out the front.
To put it crassly, you’re so full of crap people can literally smell it.
Tonsil Stones
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The last entry on this list is by far the least dangerous. In fact, for tonsil stones, the havoc they wreak on your exhaled breath is the main symptom. They seem innocent enough at first, since they’re not much more than bits of hardened mineral and food debris. The sort of thing a good swig of Coca-Cola feels like it should fix.
They are, however, going nowhere, and are perfectly content to sit and rot in the back of your throat, until their presence is being so loudly announced to the noses around you that it can’t be ignored.
As for the smell itself, it’s generally described as smelling rotten and sulfur-like.