ANALYSIS OF HAIR TOXIC AND TRACE ELEMENTS IN KOREAN CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS

Abstract

Objectives and Study: Hair tissue mineral analysis has been one of the best methods for detecting toxic elemental exposure in human for private or public purposes, because its storage of elements is cumulative and samples can be obtained via non-invasive way. Its importance is increasing in the era of environmental crisis(1). However, there have been several limitations to make this method one of the routine clinical or research tools, such as lack of standardization in pre-treatment of samples, lack of inter-laboratory quality control and lack of normal references(2). It is important to get more information about normal references for the future research especially in children. To set the normal reference values in Korean children, we conducted an analysis of the pooled data obtained from laboratory performing hair mineral analysis.