Toxicology Letters 210 (2012) 265266

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Toxicology Letters
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/toxlet

Reply to Letter to the Editor

Reply to: A commentary on Hair analysis for biomonitoring of environmental and occupational exposure to organic pollutants.

a r t i c l e
Keywords:
Hair
Mercury
Thimerosal
Dental amalgam
Biomarker
Exposure

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
In his comment on the review by Appenzeller and Tsatsakis, Dora highlights the use of hair analysis for
the biomonitoring of human exposure to mercury. Indeed, the relevance of this matrix for this specic
purpose has been demonstrated in numerous works. We acknowledge that the review was voluntarily
limited to purely organic pollutants, which excluded organic forms of metals such as methylmercury
and ethylmercury. We also remind some important aspects related to the use of hair as a biomarker of
exposure to mercury.
2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Although the detection of metal-organic compounds (organic

forms of metals) in hair has previously been reported, the review
by Appenzeller and Tsatsakis (Appenzeller and Tsatsakis, 2012)
was voluntarily limited to purely organic pollutants that have
already been detected in human hair, which excluded organic
forms of metals such as methylmercury (meHg) and ethylmercury (etHg). The main reason for this arbitrary limitation was the
fact that a multitude of studies dealing with metals detection in
hair has been published to date along with the several works
that already reviewed this specic eld. For instance, a search
on PubMed with the words hair and mercury limited to the
title section yields more than 270 items, 8 of which being identied as reviews, and the oldest ones dating back to the sixties and
seventies.
Far from relegating this domain to the past, the huge amount
of information that has been accumulated during the past decades
highlights the interest in this research area which is indeed still
particularly keen in the present days. The detection of mercury
in hair has been performed to monitor occupational exposure of
specic categories (Laffont et al., 2011) as well as environmental
exposure, mainly occurring through diet and particularly consumption of sh. The techniques used to detect mercury in hair give
access to total mercury or enable the speciation of the different chemical forms present in the samples. The latter approach,
demonstrating that meHg, the most toxic form, is the one generally dominating in hair, was also used for tracing the source
of exposure (Barbosa et al., 2001; Goull, 2007; Laffont et al.,
2011).
In this direction, the recent study presented by Dora et al.
(2011), which describes the differentiation in hair between meHg,
associated with environmental exposure, and etHg, associated with
thimerosal-containing vaccines (Dora et al., 2011) and likely to
result from dental amalgam (Pigatto, 2011), is highly relevant as

DOIs of original articles: 10.1016/j.toxlet.2011.10.021,

10.1016/j.toxlet.2012.02.009
0378-4274/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.toxlet.2012.02.010

the latter three sources of exposure to mercury concern billions

of people (Clarkson, 2002). The method sensitivity, which enabled
100% of positive detection for meHg and 75% for etHg, was comparable to the levels reached in the most recent studies for total
Hg and/or meHg. With regard to values of mercury concentration
in hair recently reported for populations from different countries
(Diez et al., 2011), the method presented by Dora and collaborators would allow 100% of positive detection. The limited amount
of sample (10 mg) necessary for analysis also has to be mentioned as it is critical parameter to ensure high compliance from
volunteers.
In that regard, we share Doras point of view concerning the
importance of the detection and speciation of organic forms of
mercury in human hair. These recent advances will contribute to
consolidate the role of hair as a reliable biomarker of exposure in
epidemiological studies.

References
Appenzeller, B.M.R., Tsatsakis, A.M., 2012. Hair analysis for biomonitoring of environmental and occupational exposure to organic pollutants: State of the art,
critical review and future needs. Toxicol. Lett. 210, 119139.
Barbosa, A.C., Jardim, W., Dorea, J.G., Fosberg, B., Souza, J., 2001. Hair mercury speciation as a function of gender, age, and body mass index in inhabitants of the
Negro River basin, Amazon, Brazil. Arch. Environ. Contam. Toxicol. 40, 439444.
Clarkson, T.W., 2002. The three modern faces of mercury. Environ. Health Perspect.
110, 1123.
Diez, S., Esbri, J.M., Tobias, A., Higueras, P., Martinez-Coronado, A., 2011. Determinants of exposure to mercury inhair from inhabitants of the largest mercury
mine in the world. Chemosphere 84, 571577.
Dora, J.G., Bezerra, V.L.V.A., Fajon, V., Horvat, M., 2011. Speciation of methyland ethyl-mercury in hair of breastfed infants acutely exposed to thimerosalcontaining vaccines. Clin. Chim. Acta, 412.
Goull, J., 2007. Metals. In: Kintz, P. (Ed.), Analytical and practical aspects of drug
testing in hair. CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group.
Laffont, L., Sonke, J.E., Maurice, L., Monrroy, S.L., Chincheros, J., Amouroux, D., Behra,
P., 2011. Hg speciation and stable isotope signatures in human hair as a tracer
for dietary and occupational exposure to mercury. Environ. Sci. Technol. 45,
99109916.
Pigatto, P.D., 2011. Speciated organic mercury, scalp hair, and biomonitoring of
exposure to thimerosal-containing vaccines. Clin. Chim. Acta 413, 355.

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Reply to Letter to the Editor / Toxicology Letters 210 (2012) 265266

Brice M.R. Appenzeller

Laboratory of Analytical Human Biomonitoring
CRP-Sante, Universit du Luxembourg, 162A avenue
de la Faencerie, L-1511, Luxembourg, Grand Duchy
of Luxembourg
Aristidis M. Tsatsakis
Centre of Toxicology Sciences and Research, Division
of Morphology, Medical School, University of Crete,
Voutes, Heraklion 71003 Crete, Greece

Corresponding

author. Tel.: +352 46 66 44 67 27;

fax: +352 22 13 31.
E-mail address: brice.appenzeller@crp-sante.lu
(B.M.R. Appenzeller)
Available online 19 February 2012