Deciphering Health Clues from Your Fingernails
February 13, 2025What Your Fingernails Say About Your Health
Your fingernails may hold the key to deciphering the state of your health. With modifications in color, thickness, and shape, nails can indicate an array of health issues, from infections to serious illnesses. Understanding these nail changes, whether it's clubbing, white flecks, or Beau's lines, can help with early detection and prompt treatment of underlying conditions. Not just an accessory, nails function as a diagnostic tool telling a story about our overall health, urging us to pay close attention.
Read the full story here: What your fingernails can reveal about your health
Highlights
- Fingernails serve as a window to overall health, with changes potentially indicative of underlying conditions.
- Clubbing of nails is a sign of extremely low blood oxygen levels, with various possible associated health issues, including lung cancer and heart infections.
- Discoloration of nails such as white marks or complete whitening could suggest heavy metal poisoning, psoriasis, protein deficiency, or other serious conditions.
- Similar conditions to clubbing, conditions like koilonychia, where the nail curves inwards and seems thin and brittle, could be symptomatic of conditions like anaemia.
- Leukonychia, white flecks on the nails, usually indicates nail trauma but can also signal heavy metal poisoning or disease. Doctors also use other nail characteristics to diagnose fungal infection and other conditions.
The state of your fingernails can serve as an extension to understanding your health. Alterations in the color, thickness, and shape of your nails might suggest an infection or signal an underlying disease. Physicians often use them to diagnose conditions ranging from dermatological problems to kidney illnesses, autoimmune disorders, and more. Certain common conditions like clubbing, where the loss of the angle between the nail and the nail bed occurs, can indicate low blood oxygen levels, which is linked with lung cancer and many other conditions.
White discoloration or flecks on the nails, known as leukonychia, which is commonly attributed to vitamin deficiencies, generally results from nail trauma. However, they could indicate heavy metal poisoning or diseases related to deficient protein levels in the bloodstream, such as diabetes, kidney disease, or liver disease. Blue nails suggest a lack of oxygen, which could be related to severe heart disease or emphysema. Dark streaks under the nail, though often caused by trauma, might indicate subungual melanoma, a severe skin cancer.
Other nail symptoms such as a central depression in the nail, koinolychia, could suggest anemia or other conditions like Celiac disease. Beau's lines, horizontal ridges across nails, might suggest a possible protein deficiency or signal other diseases like diabetes and peripheral vascular disease. Persistent changes in nail shape, color or texture might call for a doctor's appointment. Fingernails, being visible parts of our body and an extension of the skin, provide essential clues about our overall health status.
Read the full article here.
Essential Insights
- Jasmin Fox-Skelly: Author of the original article.
- Dan Baumgardt: General practitioner in medicine and lecturer in neuroscience and physiology at the University of Bristol.
- Holly Wilkinson: Lecturer in wound healing at the University of Hull.