Hair analyses don't always detect the bald facts

Analyzing human hair to detect toxins, or mineral and nutritional imbalances and deficiencies, has become one of the more popular alternative health tools employed around the country.

But a study to be published today concludes that the laboratory tests commonly used for the analysis are unreliable and often inaccurate.

"Health care choices based on these analyses may be ineffective or even detrimental to the patients' overall health," said the study's co-authors, Dr. Debra Gilliss, a California public health official, and Sharon Seidel, a scientist at Impact Assessment Inc. in Los Angeles.

Writing in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Gilliss and Seidel said they expected to get the same results back when they submitted six hair samples taken from the scalp of a single healthy donor to six leading labs.

Instead, the reports differed widely because the labs used different test ranges, test values and interpretations.

That's one of the biggest flaws in the testing labs, experts say: There's no established standard for what and how much of any mineral "normal" hair should contain.

"Without an appropriate reference range, it is difficult to determine the clinical significance or nutritional importance of subtle changes in trace metal values in hair," said Dr. Peter Howanitz of the State University of New York, and Steven Steindel, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who wrote an editorial about the practice in the same issue of the JAMA.

They said there's no evidence that any patients have benefited from changing their diet or other health habits based on hair analysis.

According to Gilliss and Seidel, reported differences in the concentrations of 12 minerals varied by more than 10 times between the highest and lowest reported amounts at two labs, and "statistically significant extreme values were reported for 14 of the 31 minerals that were reported by three or more labs."

Seidel and Gilliss say that various hair treatments and other external exposures make it difficult to get any clear idea of what's going on in the body based on hair analysis.

An estimated quarter-million hair analyses are conducted each year in the U.S. at a cost of more than $9.6 million. The vast majority is done by nine U.S. labs, which are heavily promoted in Internet ads and publications linked to alternative medicines. The same operations also sell vitamins and other supplements intended to help correct problems the tests reveal.