Decoding Your Nails: What They Reveal About Your Health
Yellow Nails
An infection is the most common cause of yellow nails (which luckily is an easy fix). If untreated, however, nails can be permanently damaged, thickening over time before crumbling off the nail bed. In contrast, if treatment works to get rid of the yellowy tinge but it returns, this exposes a thyroid problem, diabetes, or (rarely) cancer.
Split or Cracked Nails
This contact with a wide variety of chemicals, which are unavoidable in our day-to-day life, leads to brittle and chipped nails. However, look out for fungal infection, which would split your nails, and the condition named hypothyroidism — it lacks hormone secretion needed for nails to grow stronger and healthier. In fact, it could definitely be the latter if you’re showing other symptoms like fatigue, depression, and weight gain.
Dark Lines Beneath the Nail
It is very painful to get your fingers trapped in a door, and it will typically cause bleeding under the nails which manifests as persistent black or purplish marks. If your nails have not sustained any trauma recently but the dark line or dark mark is present underneath the nail bed, you need to seek medical attention immediately, as this may be a sign of skin cancer.
Rippled or Pitted Nails
If their surfaces are anything less than smooth, you might already be deficient in Zinc, Calcium, or Vitamin A, or on the verge of an exasperating skin disease – eczema or psoriasis. Pitting, or ripples (shallow dents) across the surface of the nail, range in severity, but none are considered good news when associated with the above factors.
Bitten Nails
While bitten nails are self-inflicted, nail-biting—which often extends to the skin surrounding the nails—is sometimes the mind attempting to relieve anxiety (which can be tricky and annoying to say the least, or even debilitating). For many, nail biting is just a remnant of a childhood habit, while for others it is a compulsive behaviour that should be addressed by targeting its root cause.
Detached Nails
As the title suggests, the term for nail separation is onycholysis, which means that one or more nails are detached from the nail bed. Sometimes, it is due to the exposure to a strong chemical or drug, and sometimes, even more dangerously, it is a symptom of thyroid illness.
