Human hair instrumental neutron activation analysis and medicine

Periodically increasing and decreasing enthusiasm has accompanied the studies of medical significance of human hair elemental composition for at least two decades. In this field, nuclear analytical methods play an extremely important role, especially the instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). This paper tries to add some new knowledge to this problem. Two approaches are used — comparison of individual hair composition with certain diagnoses in clinic groups and comparison of population data with medical statistics. Rather large samples and multielement mathematical procedures helped reveal strong correlations valuable for diagnostic and health screening.