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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Your Hair Might Be A Predictor For Heart Attack! Jobs, marital or financial problems as well as other stressful events can raise the risk for developing cardiovascular disease including heart attack. However, scientists could not locate a biological marker to measure chronic stress for predicting in advance those who might be at risk of a heart attack. On September 3, 2010, Canadian researchers from the University of Western Ontario reported in the journal “Stress” that a high level of the stress hormone cortisol in hair might predict few months in advance a person’s chance of getting a heart attack. Cortisol has traditionally been measured in serum, urine, and saliva. All these matrices can measure cortisol levels in the last hours or at most few days. Therefore, they do not reflect the stress response over a longer period of time. Nevertheless, cortisol can also be captured in the hair shaft. On average, hair grows 1 cm each month and so by examining a 6 cm long strand of hair, it is possible to determine stress levels over a longer period. While the hair on a person’s head might be dead, its root (or follicle) is not. Once cortisol and other substances are released into this person’s bloodstream, they can simply seep into the hair follicle from the tiny blood vessels in the skin of the scalp.
When hair grows, the cortisol that was released to the follicle is retained in the hair shaft. This can be a living record of the amount of stress one has suffered over a period of up to 10 months. In contrast, cortisol measured in the blood or urine can only record a few hours or maximum days of the hormone’s activity. In the study, the hair samples were taken from 120 men who were admitted to the cardiac unit of the Meir Medical Center in Israel. 50 percent of these men had been diagnosed with a heart attack and the remaining was diagnosed with chest pain and infection. The cortisol level in 1.2 inches (3 cm) of the hair closest to the scalp was analyzed. Such length of hair could record hormone activity for the past 3 months or so. After adjusting for other risk factors for heart attack, the researchers found that cortisol levels were significantly higher in those men who had heart attack as compared with those men who had other illnesses. The risk factors taken into consideration for heart attack include cholesterol levels, diabetes, hypertension, smoking and a family history of coronary artery disease, and body mass index (BMI). Results of analysis also showed heart attack occurred among 68 percent of the men who had the highest level of cortisol levels, and 32 percent of those men with the lowest levels of cortisol. Cortisol is not the only one, but it is definitely an important determinant of acute myocardial infarction (technical term for heart attack). Meanwhile, the researchers also warned that results would still require replication with larger number of patients before hair-cortisol testing can go mainstream. In the meantime, the study only involved men because heart attack is more common in men, and because hormonal differences between men and women could skew the results. Therefore, the researchers are not sure whether their results will apply to women as well. Only when the results works and it could then lead to a relatively simple, noninvasive test that can be conducted in clinics to identify those who are at high risk of cardiovascular disease. The researchers also emphasize the importance of measuring stress over time because people's long-term memories of stress are not always reliable.
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