# Fish odour syndrome/tmau a possible cause of lg/fbo



## yellow11 (May 14, 2011)

Hi all,

Well there probably are many different reasons for leaky gas as it may vary from person to person but one possible cause I'd like to highlight here is something called fish odour syndrome or trimethylaminura (tmau) to give it it's proper title.
Before I say anymore the name is very misleading as sufferers are plagued by all kinds of terrible smells not just fish by any means, actually fecal smells apparently are one of the most common symptoms of it. I think I'm right in saying it is the only malodour disorder officially recognised by the medical community though I am open to correction on that.
The theory behind it is that when a person digests their food something called tma gets produced as a by product. Tma is extremely odourous but there's this enzyme called fmo3 produced by one's liver which neutralises tma so it doesn't cause a person to smell. Primary tmau is mainly genetic in origin where a person's liver doesn't produce enough or any fmo3.
Secondary tmau is where someone has a normal amount of fmo3 but their gut is colonized by a lot of tma producing bacteria overwhelming their bodies response to fight it.
Enough about the theory. What really caught my attention was that I was reading one day a tmau sufferer lamenting that people were always complaining that she had just farted or worse had just shate herself when she actually hadn't. Like welcome to my life! I have been in that lady's exact same situation countless times.

There's an interesting forum on it if people would like to learn more about it -

http://tmau.org.uk/chat/

I did get tested for it but as it turns out it came back negative. I read somewhere that only a third of tests are positive however just to confuse matters from looking on the forum it seems to be accepted the test throws up a lot of false negatives which I suspect happened to me. Reading the forum I can relate to so many of the sufferers' experiences, one of the main ones being how it seems people can smell me from crazy long distances away sometimes, if I don't have tmau I have something very similar to it and I bet that goes for an awful of the people on here too.


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