Trace elements in hair in the UK: Results and interpretation in the preconception situation

The German Environmental Survey 1990/1992 (GerES II): reference concentrations of selected environmental pollutants in blood, urine, hair, house dust, drinking water and indoor air

“…If the German results for lead and cadmium in the hair of the general population are compared with those of other countries (Krause et al, 1996b ) , they are found to be in the same range as those reported for the same time period from Austria and Italy ( Wolfsperger et al, 1994 ) or France (Frery et al, 1993 ). However, the values are lower than those reported in older studies from the US (Paschal et al, 1989 ) or the UK ( Barlow et al, 1985 ) or from developing countries (Sukumar and Subramanian, 1992;Ashraf et al, 1995 ).…”

Longitudinal hair chromium profiles of elderly subjects with normal glucose tolerance and type 2 diabetes mellitus

“…Surprisingly there was no relationship found, which casts doubt on the validity of using H-Cr as an indicator of Cr status. Several literature data [27,36,46] and a recent double-blind, crossover study measuring the effect of Cr supplementation (1 mg chromium picolinate per day) on improvement of glycemic parameters in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus [27] are also consistent with the above-mentioned assumption, namely, subjects who responded positively to Cr supplementation showed no statistically significant difference in H-Cr pr and H-Cr av contents (394 F 244 and 249 F 169 ng Cr per gram, respectively) compared with those who did not respond (294 F 102 and 254 F 115 ng Cr per gram, respectively). It should be borne in mind that diabetic symptoms always develop as a result of severe Cr deficiency; on the other hand, diabetes as a disease of complex etiology may also appear in subjects with normal Cr body stores.…”

“…It is assumed that H-Cr content may be an indicator of Cr body stores [34,36,[42][43][44]46,50,[53][54][55]60,61], which are supposed to be compromised in the diabetic state. One would then expect that diabetes would strongly influence H-Cr, which would decrease as the disease progresses.…”

“…Because impaired glucose tolerance was attributed to compromised Cr body stores, estimation of the Cr status in humans has become a most important task. Determination of Cr in blood [2,9,16,25,27,29 -41], hair [2,34,36,[42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55], and sweat [34,42,43,56] was carried out for that purpose. Changes in plasma Cr (P-Cr) in response to glucose challenge were measured, but the results of different research groups were inconsistent [9,15,27,29,36,57].…”

Relationship between concentrations of heavy metals in children’s scalp hair and the environment. A case study from Kifissos River in Attica, Greece.

“…Hair obtained from the head has become an ideal indicator for exposure to environmental heavy metals (Barlow et al, 1995;Wilhelm et al, 1994) as hair has been described as a "minor excretory organ" for trace metals, therefore it would seem reasonable to relate hair metal levels with the amount of element ingested and individual's metabolism.…”