Setting the Record Straight: What OligoScan says about hair analysis (HTMA)
HTMA: Setting the Record Straight
What OligoScan says about hair analysis – and what the peer-reviewed evidence shows
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!OligoScan and its distributors routinely characterise Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA) as inferior, unreliable, or limited. This document examines these characterisations against the cited scientific evidence.
This document quotes each claim verbatim from materials published by OligoScan, its distributors and practitioners, then presents the scientific evidence that responds to it. Every source is cited. Nothing is presented as opinion without evidential support.
“Hair is a measurement of excretion”
“Measurement of hair is also a measurement of excretion, which has taken place over the last three months.”
OligoScan Australasian distributor FAQ – oligoscan.co.nz [Accessed 19 May 2026]
This is biologically incorrect. Hair is not an excretory organ.
Minerals enter hair through vascularised hair follicles during the anagen (active growth) phase. As the hair shaft forms, minerals and metals circulating in the bloodstream are incorporated into the developing keratin structure through follicular cells.
This is tissue incorporation during keratinisation – a vascular process. Physiologically, excretion refers to elimination via the kidneys, bowel, sweat or bile. Hair does none of these things.
Biologically, hair growth is not a process of excretion; it is a process of tissue incorporation.
A 2024 review in TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry (Hsu et al.) describes hair follicles as “vascularised structures that capture chemicals circulating in the bloodstream, which are then incorporated into the hair shaft during keratinisation.” The authors explicitly frame hair as an exposome archive – a biological record of systemic circulation.
A 2025 review in Biochemical and Biophysical Reports (Florou et al.) describes hair as a chronological “archive” capable of reflecting physiological changes and environmental exposures over time – language that is the opposite of excretion.
The 2025 UC Irvine study (Shahverdian et al., co-authored by Dr David Watts, Trace Elements Inc.) published in Biological Trace Element Research confirmed that blood and hair measure different biological compartments – blood reflects tightly regulated circulating levels at a single point in time, while hair reflects an extended temporal window of mineral metabolism. The study found no significant correlation between blood and hair mineral levels for most of the nine minerals tested – confirming they are measuring different things, not different degrees of the same thing.
A 2025 review in International Journal of Molecular Sciences (Gramala et al., Poznan University of Medical Sciences) describes hair as providing “a robust long-term matrix for selected elements that strongly bind to keratin and accumulate over time”. This is accumulation, not excretion.
“Poor excreters show false negatives in hair”
“If patient is a poor excreter, as seen with many individuals, notably with the chronically ill, the toxic elements may appear under-represented in hair tissue compared to Oligoscan.”
theoligoscan.com [Accessed 19 May 2026]. The same claim appears on londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk.
This claim is built on the false premise of Claim 1.
If minerals enter hair through blood supply during keratinisation – not through excretion – then an individual’s capacity to excrete has no bearing on hair mineral levels.
A person with impaired detoxification may actually show elevated toxic metals in hair because those metals remain circulating in the bloodstream for longer periods, resulting in greater incorporation during follicular growth – the opposite of what OligoScan claims.
Further, the claim does not establish that impaired excretion makes OligoScan more accurate than laboratory hair analysis.
The Shahverdian et al. 2025 study found that hair mineral analysis demonstrates “a unique clinical utility for long-term trends and imbalances”. The study’s conclusion explicitly positions hair as capturing a different and complementary window of mineral status – not as an inferior or unreliable method.
No peer-reviewed study has compared OligoScan and HTMA results in chronically ill patients with impaired detoxification. The claim that OligoScan would show higher heavy metal levels in such patients than HTMA is entirely unverified. OligoScan itself has no independent validation study comparing its results against any reference analytical method.
“Hair only shows the past, not current status”
“Hair mineral analysis limitations are another concern. While hair testing does reflect mineral and heavy metal exposure, it primarily shows past excretion over several months rather than current status. You get a snapshot of what your body has eliminated – not what it’s retaining.”
youholistic.com [Accessed 19 May 2026]
The 2–3 month window is a clinical strength, not a weakness.
Blood serum provides a snapshot of tightly regulated circulating levels at the moment of collection – it can appear ‘normal’ even when tissue stores are severely depleted. OligoScan is also a snapshot: a single light reading of the palm taken at one moment. Hair captures what was circulating and metabolised across weeks of growth – a time-integrated record neither blood nor OligoScan provides.
For identifying chronic exposure, long-term deficiencies, and toxic metal accumulation patterns, hair’s temporal window is precisely what is needed.
The Shahverdian et al. 2025 study stated directly: “These two types of tests serve different clinical utilities: blood tests are useful for assessing the immediate status of mineral levels, while hair analysis offers insights into long-term trends and imbalances.” The paper presents the difference as complementary, not hierarchical.
A 2024 large-scale study in Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) – Kang et al., 2,026 subjects – used health checkup data combined with hair mineral analysis to predict low bone mass with an AUROC of 0.744. The key predictive minerals were sulfur, sodium, mercury, copper, magnesium, arsenic and phosphate – all captured in the hair’s 2–3 month window. This is a clinical application only possible because of, not despite, hair’s temporal integration.
A US Environmental Protection Agency report reviewed over 400 references and concluded that hair and nails are “meaningful and representative tissues for biological monitoring for most of these toxic metals” when properly collected and analysed. This institutional position reflects decades of recognition of hair’s longitudinal window as a scientific asset.
The Biology: How Minerals Enter Hair
This is a settled area of biology. The mechanism of mineral incorporation into hair has been studied and confirmed across multiple independent research groups. In plain terms:
- Hair grows approximately 1cm per month from follicles supplied by blood capillaries in the scalp.
- During the anagen (active growth) phase, which encompasses approximately 90% of scalp hair at any time, minerals and metals circulating in the blood are incorporated into the developing hair shaft through metabolically active follicular cells.
- Once the hair shaft is formed and keratinised, the minerals are structurally bound within the keratin matrix. They are stable and do not wash out under normal conditions.
- A standard 3–4cm scalp sample represents approximately 3 months of mineral metabolism – a time window determined by hair’s growth rate, not by the body’s excretory capacity.
- This process is primarily vascular and follicular in origin. It is not excretion.
“Hair is contaminated by shampoos, dyes and environment”
“Hair can also be contaminated by shampoos, dyes, or environmental factors, skewing results.”
youholistic.com [Accessed 19 May 2026]. Similar claims appear on multiple OligoScan-affiliated sites.
While external contamination is a known challenge in HTMA, accredited laboratories mitigate this risk through validated washing protocols. Ultimately, contamination is a vulnerability shared by all pathology testing when strict procedures are bypassed.
Procedures take into account both external contamination and the potential loss of endogenous elements during preparation.
A peer-reviewed study in Science of the Total Environment (LeBlanc et al.) examined the effect of commercial shampoos on hair trace element levels and found the effect was negligible except for a selenium-sulfide shampoo. This is a genuine consideration – which is precisely why accredited HTMA laboratories apply validated washing protocols and why collection guidelines exclude recently dyed or chemically treated hair.
The Shahverdian et al. 2025 study excluded subjects with dyed, permed or bleached hair and used controlled collection protocols – demonstrating that the contamination concern is actively managed in rigorous HTMA research.
The Gramala et al. 2025 review specifically highlighted the importance of “validated washing procedures and certified reference materials” as part of ICP-MS HTMA methodology – underscoring that the field actively addresses this limitation through standardisation.
“OligoScan is far superior to HTMA”
“The Oligoscan is a far superior way of testing!”
londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk [Accessed 19 May 2026]
We have not identified independent, peer-reviewed evidence establishing OligoScan’s superiority to laboratory HTMA. Claims of superiority should be supported by appropriate comparative studies.
The analytical methods are categorically different in rigour: HTMA uses ICP-MS with results traceable to certified international reference standards. OligoScan’s own manufacturer training document states its output figures are ‘no longer really ppm but Luxometrix own laboratory standards’ – proprietary, self-constructed values.
OligoScan’s own training document (Luxometrix-IPC, May 2015) states: “This type of measure is not (yet) a reference to measure the minerals and metals in the body.” If OligoScan’s own manufacturer acknowledges the device is not a reference method, the claim that it is ‘far superior’ to an ICP-MS laboratory method is without foundation.
OligoScan’s validation consists of internal comparison against clinical symptoms. No independent peer-reviewed study validates OligoScan results against ICP-MS Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis. The three studies promised in the 2015 training document with expected publication dates of 2015, 2015–2016, and 2017 have not been published as of May 2026.
A 2016 journal article presenting OligoScan as a valid measurement method is De Groodt (2016), published in the practice section of the German-language complementary medicine journal Erfahrungsheilkunde. The author declares that he is co-owner of Holigomed AG and holds the licence to distribute OligoScan in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany and Austria. The article reports no study population, no comparison against ICP-MS or any other reference method, and no statistical validation.
The only independent published study we could find that tested OligoScan against a laboratory reference method reached the opposite conclusion. In a 2025 study by a Venezuelan heavy-metals laboratory, 50 adults whom OligoScan had reported as having high lead and mercury were tested by atomic absorption. Average blood lead was 4.58 µg/dL, below the 8 µg/dL limit for people without occupational exposure, and average urine mercury was 2.54 µg/g creatinine, below the biological exposure index of 5 µg/g. The authors concluded that OligoScan “cannot be used for diagnostic purposes.”
Hair analysis has been supported by a US Environmental Protection Agency report (400+ references reviewed), and ICP-MS hair analysis is used as a biomonitoring method in peer-reviewed clinical research across cardiovascular disease, neurodevelopment, bone health and metabolic syndrome.
What HTMA Offers – And What It Does Not Claim to Be
HTMA does not claim to replace blood testing, urine testing, or any other analytical method. It measures a different biological compartment across a different time window. Used in the right clinical context, the three main testing modalities are complementary:
tightly regulated circulating levels at a single point in time. Essential for acute assessment and monitoring of analytes with rapid turnover.
reflects active renal excretion since last void. Useful for assessing immediate excretory capacity.
time-integrated mineral metabolism over 2–3 months. Used for chronic exposure patterns, long-term deficiency trends, and toxic metal biomonitoring.
The Shahverdian et al. 2025 study – the most current peer-reviewed comparison of blood and hair mineral levels in healthy adults – confirmed: “These two types of tests serve different clinical utilities” and that hair demonstrates “a unique clinical utility for long-term trends and imbalances.”
The growing body of 2024–2025 peer-reviewed research in cardiovascular disease, bone health, metabolic syndrome, and neurodevelopmental conditions uses ICP-MS hair analysis as a clinical and environmental biomonitoring tool. This evidence base is not the product of a single laboratory or advocate. It is international, multi-institution, and published in indexed peer-reviewed journals.
This document reviews published claims with reference to the sources cited and includes interpretations of the available evidence. Statements identifying limitations in OligoScan’s claims are based on cited sources or analytical conclusions drawn from the scientific literature. No allegation of improper motives or misconduct is made regarding any manufacturer, distributor or practitioner. This document does not constitute medical, legal or regulatory advice. Clinical decisions should be made in consultation with appropriate professional guidance and with reference to current evidence. InterClinical Laboratories © 2026. All rights reserved.
References
De Groodt J. OligoScan – Messen von Mineralien, Spurenelementen und toxischen Metallen auf Gewebsebene. Erfahrungsheilkunde. 2016;65:156–163. doi: 10.1055/s-0042-105092
Florou VA et al. Human hair as a diagnostic tool in medicine. Biochemical and Biophysical Reports. 2025;43:102129. doi: 10.1016/j.bbrep.2025.102129
Gramala Z et al. Essential and toxic elements in cardiovascular disease: pathophysiological roles and the emerging contribution of hair mineral analysis. Int J Mol Sci. 2025;26(24):12145. doi: 10.3390/ijms262412145. PMCID: PMC12733699
Hsu J-F et al. Hair specimens in exposome-health research: Opportunities, challenges, and applications. TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry. 2024;178:117825. doi: 10.1016/j.trac.2024.117825
Jenkins DW. Toxic Trace Metals in Mammalian Hair and Nails. EPA/600/4-79/049. United States Environmental Protection Agency, 1979. Available: cfpub.epa.gov/si/
Kang S et al. Preventive machine learning models incorporating health checkup data and hair mineral analysis for low bone mass identification. Scientific Reports. 2024;14:18792. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-69090-3
LeBlanc A, Dumas P, Lefebvre L. Trace element content of commercial shampoos: impact on trace element levels in hair. Sci Total Environ. 1999;229(1–2):121–124. doi: 10.1016/s0048-9697(99)00059-5
Luxometrix-IPC. Oligoscan Training Confidential. Luxometrix-IPC.EU, May 2015 [23-slide manufacturer training presentation]. Available: slidetodoc.com [Accessed 19 May 2026]. Original PDF verified 19 May 2026.
OligoScan. Australasian distributor FAQ. oligoscan.co.nz/faq.html [Accessed 19 May 2026]
OligoScan. Operation Notes & Pre-testing Information, v3.10, 2023 sp. oligoscan.com [Original PDF verified 19 May 2026]
Pacheco Coello FJ, Castro Márquez CY. Lead and mercury analysis using the cold vapor atomic absorption method vs. oligoscan: why not use oligoscan as a diagnostic guide? Vitae (Universidad Central de Venezuela). 2025;(103). Available: vitae.ucv.ve/pdfs/VITAE_6695.pdf
Shahverdian A, Torabzadeh S, Watts D et al. Comparison of mineral levels in blood and hair samples of healthy adults: Evaluating the clinical utility of hair mineral analysis. Biol Trace Elem Res. 2026;204(3):1915–1927. doi: 10.1007/s12011-025-04793-w. PMID: 41275064; PMCID: PMC12992362
No Comments
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.