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Health Not Always Hair Apparent

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Jan. 2, 2001 -- Just as you can't tell a book by its cover, you can't tell much about your health from your hair, according to a new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Proponents of chemical hair analysis say it's a useful tool that can point out deficiencies of minerals and nutrients as well as surpluses of harmful substances, such as lead and mercury.

To see how accurate these claims are, Sharon Seidel, PhD, of the California Department of Health Services, took scissors to scalp, clipping six good-sized chunks of her own hair and mailing them to six different labs for testing. She considered herself perfectly healthy, but says the test results that came back alerted her to a wide variety of serious ailments. The only trouble is -- she didn't have them.

Seidel says she got diagnoses "ranging from cardiovascular disease to emotional disorders like depression to incipient diabetes -- things I didn't have any indications for. I found it disturbing, and I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me."

Furthermore, she says, several labs also sent along "recommendations for certain supplements and other treatments to 'cure' my conditions." Although she is a contract toxicologist and therefore "well versed in science," Seidel admits to being shaken enough that she actually ran out and bought one of the recommended supplements.

"I think it was magnesium," she says, and although she can laugh now at her panicked reaction, she says it's an indication of the chilling effect that hair analysis can have. And the effect on a nonscientist is likely to be even greater, she says.

"And there are a lot of these tests being ordered, about 225,000 are ordered in the U.S. every year," Seidel says. Quite often, it's not MDs ordering the tests, she says, but chiropractors and other medical practitioners.

"I interviewed personnel at all the labs, and I was very surprised at the lack of knowledge about quality control," she says. For example, there is only one inter-laboratory program for quality assurance, and that program -- called the Toronto program for mercury -- is used to test the accuracy of findings about mercury. "Several of the labs didn't even know about the Toronto program," Seidel says.

Part of the problem with testing hair is that it's very difficult, Seidel says. For testing, hair is mixed with acid to reduce it to a liquid state for testing, "and that process can contaminate the sample," she says. Testing urine or blood is easier and more accurate because "you already have a liquid for analysis," she says.

Simply put, given current technology, hair analysis is just not accurate, Steven J. Steindel, PhD, of the CDC in Atlanta, tells WebMD.

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