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What
does this image have to do with armpits and deodorants?
Well,
this is Ziryab, the inventor of the first known underarm
deodorant.
He also made fashionable the idea of Muslim men
shaving
their faces – still a matter of personal choice except in
some
of the strictest sects. Ziryab was a scientist and an artist,
a
polymath of the first degree – and maybe he developed the
first
Degree (an antiperspirant – get it?).
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Mum was the first
commercial deodorant marketed to reduce body odor from the armpits – it’s
still around today under the name Ban. It was developed in Philadelphia in the
late 1890’s, and became a commercial hit. Deodorants usually contain alcohol,
acids, or triclosan, all of which kill or deter bacterial growth. More on that
in a second.
Most deodorants also contain a masking fragrance, some perfume contained in a starch microsphere. When sweat breaks down the starch,
it releases the fragrance. Starch spheres of different sizes means they
breakdown after different periods of time in sweat, so they can keep you
socially acceptable for longer periods of time.
On the antiperspirant side of the equation, Stopette was developed in 1941.
Antiperspirants contain one or more of several aluminum compounds.
Weird as it sounds, they work by combining with the ions in your sweat to clog
up your pores so that you don’t sweat. Does that mean that prolonged use will
force your underarms to swell from retained sweat until you explode and blow
off both your arms. No- but it stirs up an interesting visual.
The function of deodorants/antiperspirants is to prevent you
from offending everyone else due to the bacterial byproducts that buildup in
your armpits as the day progresses. Bacteria are on your skin – all of your
skin. In fact, you have more bacteria on your skin than you have skin
cells. Like I said, a lot of bacteria.
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Leonard
Hofstader on The Big Bang Theory apparently
was
stressing over his upcoming date with Penny. The
apocrine
glands produce nutrient rich sweat with an
increase
in stress hormones. They empty into the hair
follicles,
as opposed to onto the skin directly for eccrine
glands.
This is why some people shave their armpits to
reduce
smell, the fatty products of apocrine glands stick
to
hairs and promote more odor.
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Apocrine glands release water and salts like eccrine glands,
but their sweat contains more fats, sugars and proteins – and this is food for
bacteria. When you reach puberty, the number of these glands in the axilla
increase greatly, up to 25,000-50,000 per pit. Apparently evolution has
determined that kids don’t have anything to be stressed about.
Bacteria + bacterial food from sweat = bacterial growth and
division. With more bacteria come more bacterial products. Basically, these products are
chemicals that are produced as a function of bacterial metabolism – it’s their
waste products, communication chemicals, and toxins that we smell later in the
day.
This brings up an interesting point – well, interesting to
me – deodorants suppress odor by killing bacteria and antiperspirants suppress
bacterial growth by limiting their sweat-based food, and that then prevents the
odor. So all antiperspirants are deodorants, but not all deodorants are
antiperspirants. So that makes the products labeled as deodorant and antiperspirant just plain old
redundant.
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Actinobacteria
produce some of the most foul smelling chemicals
associated
with body odor. However, a subset of actinobacteria
called
actinomycetes make a chemical called geosmin. This is
the
chemical that gives the wonderful earthy smell after a rain.
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In fact, more Actinobacteria
were present when antiperspirants were being used, and these produce some of
the foulest smelling by products. Therefore, we may be adding to our funk by
trying to prevent it. Of course, everyone is entitled to their own crop of axillary
bacteria, so differences were seen from individual to individual.
This is may be an unfortunate effect of antiperspirant
usage, but there may be more important problems. All women are told not to
wear deodorant or lotions when having a mammogram - but do you know why? We said that
antiperspirants contain aluminum or zirconium, and we now know that these can stop X-rays from
passing through tissue. They can look like small calcifications in the tissue
of the breast, and this can lead to false readings of mammograms. That's bad enough, but they may contribute to breast cancer as well.
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This
is a mammogram image from a breast with cancer. The
main
tumor is shown with a single arrow, and the associated
microcalcifications
are shown with the double arrows.
Unfortunately,
aluminum in antiperspirants can look just like
the
calcifications, without or without underlying disease.
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A 2013 review discusses the various studies that indicate an
effect of aluminum on breast physiology, including altered iron metabolism,
increased oxygen radicals and increases in inflammation. On the other hand,
another 2013 study found no difference in aluminum concentrations in normal and
cancerous breast tissue, so the causative effect is definitely not proven.
On the other hand, antiperspirants don’t
seem to interfere with radiation therapy for breast cancer. A 2012 paper indicated that
aluminum based antiperspirants don’t affect the beams of radiation (much like
X-rays) that are used to treat some early stage breast cancers. Antiperspirants might promote breast tumors, they do mimic how breast tumors
look on X-rays, but apparently they don’t hurt the treatment once you already
have breast tumors. Weird.
contributed by
Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD
As Many Exceptions As Rules
contributed by
Mark E. Lasbury, MS, MSEd, PhD
As Many Exceptions As Rules
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