Abstract
This study presents results of instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) of nails from healthy adult individuals living in São Paulo city, Brazil. Concentrations of As, Br, Ca, Co, Cr, Fe, K, La, Na, Sb, Se and Zn were determined in fingernails and toenails and their variations with gender, age, body mass index among individuals and inter-element correlations were evaluated. These results indicated that several factors might affect in the nail element composition. In addition, there are few published data for finger and toenails analyses. However, comparisons made between the concentrations of elements obtained in fingernails were reasonable within the range of literature values. The findings of this study may contribute to establish an appropriate protocol to obtain data of nail element composition to be used as reference values.
Highlights
Analyses of human nails for their trace element contents have been studied for several decades to assess nutritional status, to estimate environmental or occupational exposure to contaminants and for clinical investigations [1,2,3,4]
Quality control of analytical results The certified reference materials, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 1577b Bovine Liver and NIST 1566b Oyster Tissue were analyzed by applying the same experimental conditions used for nail analyses and the results were evaluated on a dry weight basis, as recommended in their certificates
Variation of element concentrations in fingernails and toenails Some of our experimental data presented outliers, so the normalized residual method [24] was used to obtain robust averages with minimum interference of outliers
Summary
Analyses of human nails for their trace element contents have been studied for several decades to assess nutritional status, to estimate environmental or occupational exposure to contaminants and for clinical investigations [1,2,3,4]. Saliva or urine samples, nails reflect the health events or exposures occurring over the past 6-10 months. They represent element contents in the human body over a long period of time [5, 6]. Nail tissues can contain information about metabolic events occurred during the time of their formation, that is, the elements are removed from metabolic processes and after nail formation may be stable markers of past exposure [7]..These attributes make nails an attractive tissue for evaluation of trace element concentrations and to use as biomarkers. Several studies have been conducted to prove that trace element concentrations in nails can be changed by several pathological, physiological, nutritional and environmental factors [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]
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