Mondays at 8.30am, repeated at 8.00pm with Norman Swan Using...

Mondays at 8.30am, repeated at 8.00pm
with Norman Swan

Using Hair to Screen for Breast Cancer
8 March 1999

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A recent study has found that hair from breast cancer patients has a different intermolecular structure to hair from healthy people. This could open the way for a new diagnostic tool for Breast Cancer which could do away with mammography.


Program Transcript


Norman Swan: Welcome to the program. Today, how alcohol doesn't increase the risk of breast cancer, and how it may reduce the chances of quite a few other diseases.

Finding the right way to treat a woman with breast cancer from a drop of her blood placed on a chip;

And Australian research published in this week's edition of the journal 'Nature' which if confirmed, could turn on its head the way doctors diagnose breast cancer.

Professor Veronica James of the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University, and a team including ANSTO, the nuclear science and technology organisation at Lucas Heights in New South Wales, has found that you can tell whether a woman has breast cancer from her hair, even her pubic hair. They've also discovered the same change occurs in younger women without breast cancer, yet who carry one of the breast cancer genes.

The discovery was made by accident. Professor James was originally studying skin, and observing what happened to high energy X-rays when they were targeted at skin specimens from women with breast cancer. It looked as though the so-called diffraction pattern, the way the X-rays were distorted by the skin, had a specific and repeatable pattern.

The hair story emerged by accident. Veronica was on her way to Japan to work on a synchrotron, a high energy X-ray source, and stopped off in Britain to collect some skin samples. But when she arrived, they weren't there.

Veronica James: They'd been cleaned out by the cleaning lady, that's what they assumed, they were missing. I was on my way to Japan, I had to get samples; the end result was I asked for hair, thinking it might have a chance, just on the offchance, just to turn up with nothing would not be done. I mean you fight for time on these machines.

Norman Swan: And you tested the hair in this preliminary study, and what did you find?

Veronica James: I found that we picked out the people who had positive BRCA 1 changes.

Norman Swan: So people who were carrying the breast cancer gene.

Veronica James: I also found people who had breast cancer, and strangely enough I had a lady who'd been clear of breast cancer for 11 or 12 years, and hers was clear. So from Britain, I said, 'Am I doing anything? I've been to the same hairdresser', and they said, 'No, you've picked up breast cancer per se.'

Norman Swan: What were you actually finding in the hair, do you know what it is?

Veronica James: It's a chain in the membrane of the hair. There is this extra substance which comes in; it's disordered array, and it's logged into the membrane which binds the cortex on to the cuticle.

Norman Swan: You've now done a larger study. How consistent are these changes?

Veronica James: We've had no false negatives.

Norman Swan: Have you had false positives where people have turned up with this and it's not been breast cancer or a breast cancer risk?

Veronica James: We have some people who have turned out to be false positives, but we don't know yet whether they've got cancer or will have cancer.

Norman Swan: The claim then is that the hair test can detect women who have breast cancer with a high degree of sensitivity. In other words, it doesn't seem to miss any. And that's women who both carry and who don't carry one of the so-called breast cancer genes. But it also appears to detect gene carriers who haven't yet developed a tumour.

Veronica James isn't sure why hair and skin may change in breast cancer, but an interesting question is whether the test becomes even more positive if a woman has aggressive or advanced cancer?

Veronica James: Some of the hair had more rings than others, but as yet I haven't been able to correlate that. I mean some of them had three, four, five rings.

Norman Swan: The pattern insignia you back off the synchrotron is like rings on a tree.

Veronica James: Yes, or they're rings around the cross that you get from the normal array of atoms.

Norman Swan: Could this be an artefact? Could this be an effect of somebody who's had a perm, or somebody who's used a lot of different kinds of shampoo? In other words, could you get hair treatment interfering with your results?

Veronica James: Perms actually removed the whole structure of the hair, they create havoc with the structure. And it doesn't just wash out in a few weeks; once the perm is done the hair has to grow out before it gets any memory of what it was. We've also repeated the experiment in lots of different places, on different machines, to prove it's not a machine.

Norman Swan: And you've used hair from different parts of the body?

Veronica James: After the perm episode where it was obvious, and some people weren't really reliable, I mean I had one hair from a lady that was white, black, and kind of orange, and she didn't claim to have had her hair dyed. Well had she had it permed as well? So because of this I have moved to pubic hair, where nobody seems to do much in the line of treatment.

Norman Swan: And the results hold true for pubic hair as well?

Veronica James: Absolutely.

Norman Swan: What's the next step to this research?

Veronica James: More, obviously more. We've got three kind of outline programs to go on in April. Firstly in Argonne we do a whole set, and the second lot in Japan.

Norman Swan: So the Argonne lab. has got a synchrotron.

Veronica James: Argon has a huge synchroton, the biggest in the world. And I have had more time on this particular biocat (sic) machine than anybody else, which is rather an honour, since they opened it up only to Nobel Prize winners and this little old Australian lady. So what we're doing, we're taking a large number of samples; the samples are actually from women with all different types of breast cancer now clearly defined. We are also taking sets from gene people that have been clearly defined.

Norman Swan: And presumably controlled normally.

Veronica James: Yes. And then along with these, we're going to have the children of these, and the relatives, the brothers, sisters, whatevers, so who have or have not got breast cancer. And then we go to different forms of cancer.

Norman Swan: Because this could be a non-specific effect of cancer on the body that you get this hair effect, therefore -

Veronica James: No.

Norman Swan: You don't believe it is?

Veronica James: I've looked at some other hair from other people, they don't show this change.

Norman Swan: So why are you looking at other forms of cancer then?

Veronica James: Because they might have their own changes.

Norman Swan: If you have to use high energy machines of which there are only a handful around the world to make this diagnosis, or to actually find this chemical effect, these rings around hairs, what practical application could it possibly have?

Veronica James: Well for the first thing, the samples can be sent in an envelope. There's more than 1,000 could be done in a day on the Argon machine, and Argon are more or less gearing up to putting on a special unit just for this, and other synchrotrons are doing the same. So that huge numbers of samples could be done daily.

Norman Swan: There could almost be a commercial set up to set up a synchrotron just to do this.

Veronica James: Yes, and I think Australia might hope to get one. I think the women would unit and say 'Out with mammography', and anyone who's had one certainly would say out with it. Too painful for words.

Norman Swan: How can a man possibly comment? Professor Veronica James of the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney School of Physics.

Still to come: the latest on alcohol and breast cancer, and other technology which promises to make a big difference to women with this disease.

Reference:

James V. et al. Using hair to screen for breast cancer. Nature 1999;398:33-34


Guests on this program:
Professor Veronica James
Research School of Chemistry
Australian National University
Canberra
and
School of Physics
Sydney University
Sydney NSW 2006


Presenter: Norman Swan
Producer: Brigitte Seega


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Thought this interview , even if it is a bit dated ,may be of background interest to some

regards M