Diameter and Amino Acid Changes in Hair of Negro Children with Protein-Calorie Malnutrition. ∗

Abstract

In estimating the nutritional status of large population groups, as in the nationwide surveys of the Interdepartmental Committee on Nutrition for National Defense, protein status is particularly difficult to define. In the ab-sense of a single direct indicator of protein nutriture, the information is inferred from a number of relatively non-specific indices such as total serum protein, serum albumin, hemoglobin, stature, pigmentation of the hair, and estimates of food intake. Even with these multiple observations the protein status remains uncertain because each of the individual observations is influenced by many factors quite unrelated to protein nutriture. Recently Reinhold et al(1) found hair to serve as an index of zinc but not of copper nutritional status.

Because hair is an easily accessible, continuously growing, high protein tissue, its use as a possible indicator of protein status has been probed on several occasions. Depigmentation (2,3) loss of curl(3), reduced diameter(3), and reduced cystine content (2,3,4) have been claimed to be associated with kwashiorkor, but contradictory reports exist particularly where different racial groups have been studied (3,5). Age, sex, and race have been shown to influence the cystine content of hair(6,7).

We have reexamined the potential usefulness of hair as an index of protein status in negro children and find that the simplest of the quantitative measurements, diameter, holds promise as an indicator of protein status provided the position on the head from which the sample is taken is controlled. In previous reports, the area of the head from which the hair came has not been stated, and this omission appears, now, to have been a serious one.

The samples were obtained in Haiti from 36 neqro children ranging in age from 3 to 72 months. Their nutritional status on admission was recorded as normal, marasmus, or kwashiorkor on the basis of the usual clinical impressions. Three samples of anterior peripheral hair along the hair line and either 2 or 3 samples from the crown and back of the head were taken from each subject yielding a total of 185 specimens. The samples were either cut from the head at the scalp line or plucked.