What Your Nails Say About Your Health

If you're paying attention to your fingernails only when you're trimming them, biting them or getting a manicure, it's time to give them a little more consideration. Changes in your nails' texture or shape can indicate mild or even serious health problems you might not otherwise be aware of.

My five-year-old son, for example, recently developed indented, horizontal ridges near the bottom of his fingernails and toenails. All were about in the same place, just around cuticle-level. Mysterious, but not painful or inflamed, the ridges appeared without any other signs or symptoms of illness.

A brief search on the Internet, though, followed by a trip to his pediatrician's office, provided deeper insights into what his fingernails and toenails were telling me: about six weeks earlier, he had apparently suffered an infection or illness of some kind -- possibly even strep. The only symptom visible then was peeling skin on his hands (I had assumed his skin had been irritated by working with paper mache or some other material at preschool).

Whatever the illness was, though, it was strong enough to interfere with the normal growth of his nails. Because fingernails grow by about 1 millimeter every 10 days (toenails grow a little more slowly), that interference became visible as horizontal ridges -- known as Beau's lines -- on my son's nails several weeks later.

Fortunately, he's now healthy as can be, and his doctor says we'll probably never know what he had that caused the nail problem. The lesson I've learned, though, is that paying attention to your nails can be one more way of tracking your health and keeping healthy.

Following are some nail conditions to watch for, and what they might indicate (remember, always check with a doctor first rather than trying to treat yourself without knowing for sure what the problem is):