Correspondence to: Professor V. J. James, Ph.D., Research School of Chemistry, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia (e-mail: vjs{at}bigpond.com).
Previous reports of the changes in the structure of hair in women with breast cancer (1, 2) have shown no false-negative results but have reported a number of false-positive results. We present updated reports of two patients that indicate that the changes in the fiber diffraction patterns from hair may reveal a very early stage of breast cancer not as yet visible by any other technique and, therefore, the false-positive results may not be false.
The synchrotron fiber diffraction experiments for these two patients were carried out or repeated on the ChemMatCARS and BioCAT facilities at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne, IL). The experiments followed the protocol of James et al. (1, 2), as reported earlier.
For patient 1, two samples of hair were examined. The first sample was a scalp hair taken when she was 38 years old and supposedly in perfect health. The second sample was a pubic hair taken when she was 43 years old and was undergoing radiation therapy and chemotherapy treatments after surgery to remove an invasive ductal breast carcinoma. Results of these two experiments are illustrated in Fig. 1. The ring associated with breast cancer is clearly visible in both samples from this patient, indicating that the breast cancer-associated change in the hair was already present when she was 38 years old although the breast cancer was not detected by mammography until she was 43 years old.
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As yet, these are the only two proven instances of a false-positive result later being shown to be a true-positive result. However, a number of other false-positive results have come from women who have a strong family history of breast cancer for whom either the gene tests were positive or not carried out. Only time will tell how many of the false-positive results are truly false and how many are true indications that breast cancer can be seen at a much earlier stage by this technique.
NOTES
I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Access to Major Research Facilities Program, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia, and of the Associates of the Camden Valley Golf Club. Use of the ChemMatCARS Sector 15, Advanced Photon Source (APS), was supported by the Australian Synchrotron Research Program, which is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia under the Major National Research Facilities Program. ChemMatCARS Sector 15 is principally supported by the National Science Foundation/U.S. Department of Energy under grant CHE0087817 and by the Illinois Board of Higher Education. APS is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Science under contract W-31-109-ENG-38. BioCAT is a National Institutes of Health-supported research center RR-08630.
REFERENCES
1 James V, Kearsley J, Irving T, Amemiya Y, Cookson D. Using hair to screen for breast cancer. Nature 1999;398:334.[CrossRef][Medline]
2 Meyer P, James VJ. Experimental confirmation of a distinctive distraction pattern in hair from women with breast cancer. J Natl Cancer Inst 2001;93:8735.
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