CAN DANDRUFF PREDICT DISEASE

Researchers are hoping a new analytic technique can someday help detect major diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's disease. In the meantime, the approach is proving useful at telling how bad a case of dandruff a person has.
The technique, known as metabolomics, enables scientists to track the metabolic processes in cells by identifying the chemicals, or metabolites, left behind from these processes. Procter & Gamble Co. says it has used metabolomics to find chemical markers on the scalp of dandruff-sufferers that indicate the severity of the condition. Researchers at the big consumer-products company say the discovery may help them develop better dandruff treatments, by monitoring changes in the scalp chemicals in the test lab. Currently, assessing the effectiveness of new treatments requires using employees known as "dandruff graders" who comb through people's scalps and rate the level of dandruff, a highly unreliable process.
Doctors routinely measure chemicals in the body to get health information, such as cholesterol and triglycerides. Metabolomics, however, involves measuring hundreds or thousands of chemical processes, such as the breakdown of nutrients from the diet, going on in the body at the same time, which could yield a lot more information. It can also account for environmental factors, such as how well a patient is absorbing medications. Since metabolism—energy generation or breakdown—gets disrupted in many diseases, figuring out how these metabolic pathways change could potentially yield better ways of diagnosing or treating a wide range of diseases.
One needs a composite picture of how the body works because multiple processes are going on at the same time and often interact with each other. By understanding, for example, that three or four pathways are disrupted in a disease, one can develop more effective treatments that target all, not just one, of those pathways.
One challenge in metabolomics is being able to sift through and identify all the chemicals in a sample. Often a tool called mass spectrometry is used, which delivers a print-out showing the chemical signatures as jagged lines of peaks and valleys. Each peak represents a metabolite present in the sample, which is typically taken from blood or urine. Researchers figure out what chemicals the peaks correspond to by analyzing its molecular weight. Sometimes additional chemical analyses are performed to confirm the initial tests.
Dandruff: Myth or Fact
Myth: Dandruff is just due to a dry scalp.
Fact: It's not. Dandruff is a complex inflammatory response.
Myth: Dandruff is always visible.
Fact: Flakes are only one sign of an unhealthy scalp.
Myth: Dandruff is contagious.
Fact: Dandruff may be a response to fungus, but it doesn't appear to be transmittable between people.
Myth: Dandruff is due to not washing enough.
Fact: Not so. Dandruff appears to be a reaction to a fungus that is on everyone's scalp.
Metabolomics is well suited to analyzing dandruff, which isn't just skin flaking as a result of a dry scalp. Dandruff is thought to be a complex inflammatory response to a common fungus on the scalp that disrupts the normal process of shedding skin cells. When people with a healthy scalp shed dead skin cells, enzymes digest the connections between the cells so the cells slough off individually, and invisibly. In some people, however, the immune system, for reasons that remain unknown, reacts to the fungus in a way that disrupts the typical enzyme process. This causes clusters of thousands of dead cells to be shed at the same time, resulting in visible flakes and itch. Dandruff affects millions of people in the U.S.
At Procter & Gamble, researchers hunted for molecules signaling inflammation of the outermost layer of scalp skin. The aim was to identify biological markers that indicate deeper changes going on within the skin tissue. Samples of skin cells were taken from the scalps of several hundred participants, some with dandruff and others with healthy skin. Researchers analyzed the chemicals that the cells from healthy scalps had produced and compared them to the dandruff sufferers. They eventually identified several markers of inflammation that differed between the groups. The markers can now be used to monitor participants in trials of new dandruff products to determine whether someone's condition is improving.
Another P&G dandruff study used similar methods to look for chemical markers that were related to itching, a symptom that dandruff sufferers often complain about. They identified elevated histamine markers in dandruff sufferers, confirming the idea that histamine is involved in itch and could be targeted in future treatments. The findings could help advance research in skin conditions, including psoriasis and eczema.
Extensive metabolomics research is being conducted in other medical conditions as well. At the Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown University, researchers are looking at the metabolites of smokers to understand why some get cancer and some don't.
In a small study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research this year, scientists examined hundreds of chemicals in the blood and urine from nine smokers and 10 nonsmokers. They found varying levels of nicotine-related metabolites in the smokers, which suggests that some smokers process nicotine differently than others. The goal is to figure out if these nicotine-related metabolites can be used to predict which individuals will get cancer.
Understanding how metabolism gets disrupted in Alzheimer's disease also is being investigated.
One doctor assessed more than 800 types of fats found in blood samples from 26 Alzheimer's patients and 26 cognitive normal adults. The study found for the first time an elevation of a particular type called sphingolipids in those with Alzheimer's.
The finding is important because lipids help make up brain cells, and may one day be used to help identify people with the memory-robbing disease.