Early diagnosis of breast cancer by hair diffraction

Abstract

A correlation between the incidence of breast cancer and an observed change in the X-ray diffraction pattern of hair from the afflicted individuals was first reported in 1999. Since that time, over 500 hair samples have been analyzed in double-blinded breast cancer studies with no false negatives being detected. To correlate this observed change with the presence of breast cancer, we examined whiskers removed from nude mice prior to and 8 weeks after subcutaneous implantation of a human breast cancer cell line. Here we show that the change observed in human hair was also evident in whiskers and that it appeared soon after cancer cell implantation.Key words: breast cancer; X-ray diffraction; hairThe report in 1999 1 suggesting that breast cancer could be diagnosed by X-ray diffraction of hair created enormous interest and skepticism. Several groups attempted to repeat this work and some reported that they were unsuccessful. Their failures highlighted the specialized nature of the technique and their lack of expertise in the fiber diffraction of ␣-keratin in hair. This investigation requires not only expert sample-handling skills but also a very clean and finely focused X-ray beam that has a large signalto-noise ratio combined with a suitable detector system having an extremely wide dynamic range. Several of the research groups 2-6 failed to produce any reflections characteristic of the basic ␣-keratin pattern despite the fact that a normal pattern (Fig. 1a) had been published. 1,7 Figure 1 is a composite image with a normal diffraction pattern on the left-hand side and a pattern with the breast cancer ring on the right-hand side. The 7th and 19th orders of the 47 nm lattice are indicated and clearly visible in both patterns; the diffuse ring associated with breast cancer is also indicated but, as can be seen, is much less intense than the 7th order. Without being able to produce a normal pattern that has the 7th order visible, there is no hope of distinguishing any changes, let alone the ring associated with breast cancer.None of those who failed to reproduce our results followed our protocol. Briki et al. 8 actually reported differences between the normal samples and those from persons with breast cancer, but their methods and results were different from ours. The main difference they reported was the presence of very wide dark rings in their normal samples. A statement by V. James published as a postscript to their paper and demonstrated in a subsequent paper 9 describes these dark rings as artifacts of their sample preparation since these rings were far more intense than the 7th and 19th orders of the 47 nm lattice. They presented samples to the beam by pulling hairs into capillary tubes, which left them loose at the ends, resulting in twisted and unaligned hair shafts. 9 The most recent unsuccessful team 10 used an unsatisfactory method for data analysis that showed their lack of expertise in fiber diffraction and lack of understanding of the normal ␣-keratin pattern. The problems associated with their analys...

Reproducibility of cancer diagnosis using hair

“…After reading and deliberating on the paper that you recently published concerning breast cancer diagnosis by analysis of hair, 1 we felt compelled to bring to your attention several of our concerns regarding this work and that presented elsewhere. We are troubled that, to a non-specialist, the correlations between the patient disease state and the diffraction features would seem high.…”

Localised breast cancers may have systemic influences on skin and hair

“…Results: (1) In normal women, there are significant correlations between the levels of expression of cyclin D1, bcl-2 and p53 in normal breast epithelial cells and breast skin epithelial cells. (2) These patterns of biomarker expression in normal women are similar in breast cancer and breast skin epithelial cells of women with invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) and ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), but are at significantly higher levels in both breast cancer cells and skin from the same subjects. (3) In normal women, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER-2) is not expressed in either breast epithelial cells or skin epithelial cells.…”

Diagnosis of breast cancer by X‐ray diffraction of hair

“…1,2,23 In the most convincing publication to date, the spacing was not specified at all. 3 The reasons for such a difference have not been adequately addressed.Further data supporting the finding was presented by James et al using an animal model of breast cancer.3 To correlate the observed change with the presence of breast cancer, whiskers removed from nude mice prior to, and 8 weeks post, subcutaneous implantation of a human breast adenocarcinoma cell line were analysed using X-ray diffraction. The post-implantation whiskers showed the presence of a ring in the X-ray diffraction pattern, similar to that seen for human subjects affected by breast cancer.…”

“…1,2,23 In the most convincing publication to date, the spacing was not specified at all. 3 The reasons for such a difference have not been adequately addressed.…”