Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Answer:
Paper Instructions:

Hair samples are a promising way of detecting hormones in a human being, which could provide a better and deeper understanding of various psychological disorders for example. Because of its ability to provide a long-term, month-by-month measure of systemic hormone exposure, hair analysis is becoming a useful and practical tool, capable of answering clinical questions that could previously not be answered by other tests. 

This study would be largely based in the Biomarker Laboratory and would be exploring evaluating and optimising the procedures used to analyse naturally occurring hormones ( for example: testosterone, cortisol, estrogen and progesterone)  in hair as well as looking at potential confounds with the hair sample that may alter the recorded hormone concentrations.

Hair sample will be collected by visiting a barber shop that would agree that we can ask approximately 40 customers with already quite short hair (so the hair samples have a much better and “undisturbed” concentration of the naturally occurring hormones, as the closer to the scalp the fresher the hair is) to provide us with their hair sample. Every customer will be informed about our research with an debrief of the research plus an information sheet for every participant in plain English and asked to give us their consent through voluntarily signing the consent paper. 
As we don’t investigate in this study about any differences between different populations or conditions of the participants these questions won’t be asked. Name, Gender and Age are the only questions that will be collected with the hair samples. As different genders have different concentrations of hormones (like Cortisol and Testosterone). The only exclusion is in cases were the participants is younger than 18 of age, which will be asked in the consent sheet (for more details please see the consent paper). After Consent the samples will be randomly numbered which will provide full anonymity.

This work is quite new as there is minimal hair sampling research overall and there is none (for our knowledge) that has done a comparison of the methods to this extent, as we will be using ELISA which is a different and much economic and faster method and would like to see if our method of ELISA will correlate with LC/MS, which would be the baseline.
As we want to look at all the naturally occurring and observable hormones, this is a unique opportunity and will at least increase the amount of data that this area lacks and expand our knowledge of this methodology and its validity.