dyor, page-33

http://www.hairroute.com/news/breastcancer.htm

Does hair reveal breast cancer, or doesn't it?

A controversy is raging among international researchers over a report published in the March issue of the scientific journal Nature, claiming that the structure of human hair can reveal whether or not a woman has breast cancer.

At the center of the argument is an Australian research team, led by Veronica James, a physicist at the University of New South Wales, that used a complex process called X-ray diffraction to analyze hair and found that breast-cancer patients and people who carried a breast-cancer gene had different molecular characteristics in their follicles than did healthy subjects. The results of their study, said Dr. James, suggest that "hair analysis has the potential to one day replace mammograms as a screening test for the disease."

Dr. James had samples of scalp and pubic hair suspended in an X-ray beam and observed the diffraction pattern that was produced when the hairs were bombarded with powerful synchrotron radiation. Tom Irving, a biophysicist at the Illinois Institute of Technology who co-authored the Nature report, said the hair of breast-cancer patients consistently resulted in one or more ring-shaped shadows.

Scientists in other countries were not impressed with the Australian team's findings. When research groups in the U.S., England, France and Italy tried to duplicate Dr. James's results, they failed on all counts. Malcolm Capel, a biophysicist at the U.S. Energy Department's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. said, "virtually everyone on the planet with the billion-dollar synchrotron equipment has tried to replicate the findings."

Dr. James was invited to the U. S. to offer further details of the data, "but we walked away from our talks with her, feeling it was a completely non-scientific study," said Dr. Capel. "Quite frankly, we got a little cranked," he explained.

Dr. James has responded by calling her critics "incompetent in hair analysis." As an expert in hair structure, investigating the possibility of uncovering health problems through hair analysis, she is not a stranger to controversy. Human hair produces new growth at a rate greater than any other cellular structure in the body except bone marrow. Because it grows so fast, hair rapidly reflects changes in the human system, and some medical researchers believe that it is currently undervalued as a diagnostic tool. High concentrations of calcium and magnesium in hair indicate metabolic disorders, like low blood sugar. Low levels of zinc may reveal physical or emotional stress. High concentrations of lead can point to mental retardation, even death. In the past, Dr. James has published reports suggesting that unmanageable hair could indicate a poor diet, a hormonal imbalance or even the onset of hardening arteries or diabetes. In the spring of this year she told The New York Post that "people with diabetes find their hair isn't manageable when the sugar is high." She later speculated that cancer also causes changes in blood sugar that could affect hair structure.

But the suggestion that hair analysis might be used as a screening test for breast cancer has met with stiff opposition. "We think it¹s a spurious claim, with a lot of subjective judgments," said Dr. Capel. He and two other research teams promised to publish their observations late in the summer, and a French research team hopes that its contradictory findings will be published in Nature very soon. Undeterred, Dr. James is continuing her research. Dr. Irving says she felt annoyed that people without expertise in understanding hair could expect to easily read and interpret the diffraction images. "So far she has analyzed 400 samples with consistently encouraging results," says Dr. Irving.