Nurses smell stool for diarrhea cause: nursing nose makes odiferous diagnosis

Can nurses smell the diagnosis better than doctors and tests? Especially by smelling stool for cause of diarrhea?

Nurses have long been contributing to astute observations that have stood the test of time. A shining example is Sister Mary Joseph's nodule.

All diarrheas are not the same and nurses can smell and actually diagnose the cause for diarrhea. An early diagnosis can help early specific treatment.

While rotavirus gastroenteritis appears clinically to be similar to other types of diarrhea, nurses were able to correctly diagnose Rotavirus as the cause in 69% on the bases of the stool smell alone. This was reported by Poulton and colleagues in the Archives of Diseases in Childhood.

Clostridium difficile diarrhea can be devastating and prompt treatment may help attenuate the seriousness pending results of investigations. Johansen and colleagues studied diarrheal stool sample and found that nurses could identify Clostridium difficile toxin positivity in 31 out of 37 cases yielding a sensitivity and specificity of 84 and 77% respectively. The authors concluded that there is a characteristic “Clostridial odor” that helps nurses identify the cause.

These results of the odiferous diagnosis were confirmed in a more recent study by Burdette and Bernstein and published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases 2007.

Do you believe the data above that nurses have sharp noses and can actually identify cause of diarrhea? Do you think it is because they tend to be more perceptive as an occupation OR that nurses are predominantly women and that women are more perceptive than men? Please share your thoughts.

Comments

[mel]

interesting information in this article and very informative blog. As an experienced healthcare person I agree with most of the article. .
Very Honest and str8 forward. Thanks for doing it

[PJ Maine MedSurg RN]

Interesting blog. I have read that women have more sensory receptors than men at least for hearing and smell, so that may be part of it. As a hospital nurse, I spend 8 hours living with my patients and intimately caring for them...can't help but notice smells. I, unfortunately or not, have a diminished sense of smell and so don't have this capability to identify diarrhea smells and source, other than the very obvious ones of cdiff and GI bleeding. My coworkers are very good at this though. I think it's a matter of experience...as a new nurse you notice the diarrhea and associated smell, and then learn the cause after tests. The smells most definitely become ingrained in your memory.