Researchers from the Erasmus University Medical Center (The Netherlands) argue that hair structure can reveal a person’s emotional state for several months. The hitherto existing methods for cortisol (a stress hormone) level analysis could not give such a retrospective pattern.
Dutch researchers remind us that high cortisol levels reflect not only the poor condition of the psyche, but also the fact that a person is at risk of developing diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, which are among the most common death causes around the world.
Thanks to the discoveries made by the Erasmus Medical Center staff, it has become possible to assess the risk of terminal diseases through a hair survey. As it turned out, hair stores information about the changes in cortisol levels longer than blood does.
To confirm this theory, experts cite the results of the empirical research. To test their hypothesis, they cut 4-centimeter hair strands from 283 volunteers aged 65 to 85. That was enough to determine the level of the stress hormone and its changes in a three-month period.
