Research of the past 15 years has shown that hair (and to some extent nails also) can be an excellent biological specimen for the assessment of chronic stress. Many hormones (foremost steroids) enter the growing hair shaft in minute amounts and accumulate there over prolonged periods of time. The analysis of a given part of the hair (a hair ‘segment’) can thus provide the researcher with a long-term marker of hormone activity. Like HbA1c tells your doctor how high or low your blood sugar level was in the past 4-6 weeks, steroid hormone levels in hair reflect the production and availability of hormones over the past months. In fact, we can now trace back the endocrine history of a patient or a study participant for at least 3-6 months!

Since hair collection is stress-free and can be done by the patients/subjects at home, it can be the perfect specimen for large-scale and/or remote studies. Why don’t you try it?

A bonus from us: If you order hair cortisol analysis, you will always receive cortisone levels for free. Since hair can be easily contaminated on the outside (e.g., by cortisol-containing cremes or ointments used in the family or by the partner), leading to false-high hair cortisol results, cortisone levels let you judge whether a given high cortisol level is ‘true’ or rather the result of contamination.

Strictly speaking, the ‘Hair Lab’ is not only about hair: We routinely extract stress biomarkers and endocannabinoids also from fur, feathers, or fish scales. A great way to check animal welfare!

For quality reasons, we perform hair analyses by LC-MS/MS methodology only.