Hair and nail hormones to promise all-new methodology for epidemiology

2021 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19K22890
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Research (Exploratory)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Medium-sized Section 62:Applied informatics and related fields
• Research Institution: Nagaoka University of Technology
• Principal Investigator: Nomura Shusaku 長岡技術科学大学, 工学研究科, 教授 (80362911)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-06-28 – 2022-03-31
• Keywords: ストレス / ストレスホルモン / コルチゾール / 毛髪 / 爪

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Human hair and nail sample have some hormones which are secreted in the blood stream and captured when they formed at their matrices. This simple fact entails the possibility of these specimens to be taken as a recoding devise of the history of human hormonal secretion in a long term. To test this hypothesis, 30 days salivary secreted cortisol, which is highly correlated with blood cortisol, and nail and hair cortisol for the relevant (30 days) period were determined. As for results, as expected, nail and hair cortisol were significantly associated with the 30-days integrated salivary cortisol.

Free Research Field

応用情報学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究により、毛髪や爪は中長期にわたる体内のホルモンの分泌状態が反映された、いわばホルモン分泌の記録媒体であることが示唆された。ホルモンは日々の健康状態のバロメータであり、これを「生活ごみ」である毛髪や爪から定量評価できるということは、本研究でテーマとした疫学研究に限らず、広く社会一般における健康評価・管理のあり方を変える新しい方法論であると考えられる。