Hair Article-Dr. Hatch

BYU BioAg Magazine--Spring 07

EATING DISORDER? YOUR HAIR KNOWS

Dr. Kent Hatch (Integrative Biology) and a team of colleagues have developed a method to diagnose eating disorders using hair samples. The team achieved 80 percent accuracy with five hairs from each participant.

The development of a physiological test for anorexia and bulimia nervosa, which afflict one to five percent of young women in the United States, is important because of the inability of many who suffer from the conditions to recognize their illness and be honest about their eating practices.

"Currently, eating disorder diagnoses are based on some objective measures such as body mass index, but also on subjective evaluations and surveys that require accurate input form the patient," said the team leader Hatch. "Our work would give a clinician an objective measure, and we hope it will eventually allow a sound diagnosis at an earlier stage."

Two undergraduates, Morgan Crawford and Amanda Kunz, ran the anaylses and helped write the paper.

"This was a fascinating project, and this type of research hasn't really been done before, even though eating disorders are such a big problem," said Crawford, now in her second year at the University of Utah School of Medicine.

"The hair is sort of like a tape recorder," said Hatch. "It grows from the base and new hair is added as the strand is pushed up and out of the follicle. The person's nutritional state affects the isotopic composition of the carbon and nitrogen (13C/12C and 15N/14N ratios) of the proteins added to the hair at that moment."

Co-author Steve Thomsen, has published several studies examining the impact of media on women's diet and boyd image. People with eating disorders are often unable or unwilling to discuss their dietary practices," said Thomsen. "But the hair can tell the story."

This story was released by BYU News October 16, 2006 [Michael Smart author; Mark Phibrick photographer]. The study was published in the Nov. 30, 2006 issue of the journal Rapid Communications in Mass Spectromentry.

Team members were Dennis Eggett (Statistics). Stephen Nelson (Geology), Beverly Roeder (Integrative Biology) and Steve Thomsen (Communications).