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Measuring Hair Growth

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Hair analysis is a useful tool to analyze and observe the substances in the human body. Hair growth is affected by these substances, as well as by other factors. Ethnicity, environment, where on the body the hair is from, age, gender, etc., can all affect how hair grows. Even hair dye and bleaching can affect the hair, amongst other factors. Because of all this variability, properly measuring hair growth rate and most importantly, properly measuring its results can be difficult. Particularly, the effects of drug consumption are constantly researched. How to do the research and deciding what the results mean are difficult to definitively ascertain. What is the cut off?, how does frequent drug consumption play a role?, what about the lag between doses? These are all uncertainties involved with hair analyses and their results. …show more content…

Drug-related deaths, restoration of a driver’s license, prenatal exposure, criminal responsibility and narcotic law offenses are among the examples. Then, there are the recommendations for how analysis should be done. Before the testing actually begins, there’s the removal of the hair: it should be collected from a certain part of the scalp, cut as close to the skin as possible, tied together, and wrapped in aluminum foil while stored in room temperature. Then comes the sort of pre- and during-experiment analysis, a demand to take in factors that may affect the results. Possible passive contamination should be evaluated, metabolites should be identified, metabolite-to-parent drug ratios should be used, threshold values (cut-off values) should be used, etc. After that, the article gives a recommendation list of metabolites to be analyzed, as well as the metabolite-to-parent drug

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