What your earwax can reveal about your health
- White Stone
- Jul 2
- 3 min read
Excerpted and adapted from the BBC
It’s orange, sticky, and probably the last thing you’d want to discuss over lunch—but earwax is proving to be a goldmine of medical insights. Known scientifically as cerumen, this waxy substance is gaining the attention of researchers for its potential to help diagnose diseases ranging from cancer and diabetes to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
Earwax is made by glands in the outer ear canal—the ceruminous and sebaceous glands—and collects dead skin, hair, and other particles as it slowly travels outward. This slow buildup actually works in our favor: unlike blood or urine, earwax accumulates gradually and holds a longer-term record of our body’s metabolic state.
"Many diseases in living organisms are metabolic," says Professor Nelson Roberto Antoniosi Filho of the Federal University of Goiás in Brazil. "In these cases, mitochondria—the cell organelles responsible for converting lipids, carbohydrates, and proteins into energy—begin to function differently from those in healthy cells. They start to produce different chemical substances and may even stop producing others."
His research team discovered that earwax collects a broader and more stable variety of these metabolic substances—particularly volatile organic compounds (VOCs)—than other bodily fluids. And those VOCs may hold the chemical fingerprints of serious diseases.
In a 2019 study, the team analyzed earwax samples from 52 cancer patients (with lymphoma, carcinoma, or leukemia) and 50 healthy individuals. They identified 27 VOCs that could accurately distinguish those with cancer from those without—with 100% accuracy. While the test couldn’t differentiate between types of cancer, the presence of these shared VOCs suggests a common metabolic disruption across cancer types.
"Although cancer consists of hundreds of diseases, from a metabolic point of view, cancer is a single biochemical process, which can be detected at any stage through the evaluation of specific VOCs," explains Antoniosi Filho.
Today, his team is narrowing their focus to a smaller subset of these compounds—those that are produced exclusively by cancer cells. Their goal? Early detection. In unpublished work, the team has already demonstrated that these metabolic changes can be spotted even in pre-cancerous stages—when cells are beginning to behave abnormally but haven't yet become cancerous.
And that matters greatly. “Considering that medicine indicates that most cancers diagnosed at stage 1 have up to a 90% cure rate, it is conceivable that the success in treatment will be much higher with the diagnosis of pre-cancer stages,” Antoniosi Filho adds.
Their vision for the future is bold: a simple, routine “cerumenogram” every six months that could screen for cancer, diabetes, and even neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s—all using a small sample of earwax.
Brazil’s Amaral Carvalho Hospital has already adopted the cerumenogram for cancer monitoring, marking a significant step forward.
Other researchers are also turning their attention to the untapped diagnostic power of earwax. Biomedical scientist and researcher Musah, for example, is working on a test for Ménière’s disease—a chronic inner ear disorder with no current cure. Her team is developing an earwax-based diagnostic kit, similar to over-the-counter COVID-19 tests. Just identifying three unusually low fatty acids in earwax could offer valuable clues into the disease’s causes and lead to potential treatments.
"Earwax is a really wonderful matrix to use because it is very lipid-rich, and there are lots of diseases that are a consequence of dysregulation of lipid metabolism," says Musah.
Perdita Barran, a chemist and professor of mass spectrometry at the University of Manchester, sees similar potential. Though she doesn’t study earwax directly, she notes, “The compounds that you find in blood tend to be water-soluble, whereas earwax is a very lipid-rich substance, and lipids don't like water. So if you only study blood, you only get half the picture. Lipids are the canary in the coal mine molecules. They're the ones that really start changing first."
As strange as it may sound, earwax might just be one of the most promising windows into our long-term health. The next time you reach for a cotton swab, you might want to think twice—your earwax could be holding secrets your body is eager to tell.
Would you be open to getting your earwax analyzed as a routine health checkup?
Yes – if it helps catch diseases early, I'm all for it
Maybe – I’d like to see more research first
No – sounds too strange or invasive
I already monitor my health through regular lab tests and d
Comments