A new study has shown that exposure to human odours, collected from other people's sweat, may be used to boost treatment for some mental health issues. According to the study by European Psychiatric Association (EPA), the researchers demonstrated that social anxiety was reduced when patients were exposed to human 'chemo-signals', or what they typically refer to as body smell, derived from volunteers' underarm sweat.

"The results of our preliminary study show that combining these chemo-signals with mindfulness therapy seems to produce better results in treating social anxiety than can be achieved by mindfulness therapy alone," said lead researcher Elisa Vigna of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The study involves collecting sweat samples from volunteers and then exposing patients to chemo-signals extracted from these sweat samples while they were receiving social anxiety treatment.