Can Breast Cancer Be Detected with Hair Follicles?
Mammograms are far from an ideal way to detect breast cancer. They are uncomfortable, miss tumors about 10% of the time, and frequently “find” tumors that don’t exist. An Australian company hopes to solve some of these problems by examining not the breast, but hair follicles. Sydney-based Fermiscan has built its diagnostic test upon a discovery that breast tumors can cause minute changes in the structure of a woman’s hair. Those changes, Fermiscan believes, can be detected by examining light diffracted from the follicle. The company is now testing the theory in a 2,000-patient trial. It sends hair gathered from doctors’ offices to Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Ill., where the follicles are analyzed using powerful X-ray beams from a large particle accelerator. Fermiscan claims earlier tests have shown its method to be 80% accurate. But other scientists have yet to duplicate its results. What’s more, the company acknowledges that its method cannot detect which breast is cancero
