Determination of cholesterol in human hair using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry

This work describes a sensitive method for determining cholesterol in human hair using GC‐MS. In this study, we used a very small amount of hair, only 1 mg, to quantify cholesterol. We also can achieve more effective purification and a good recovery over 92% with solid‐phase extraction using an Oasis HLB cartridge. The intra‐day and inter‐day precision and accuracy values were less than 7.08%. Cholesterol was determined to be in the range of 355–1693 µg/g in healthy human hair. We tested the concentration correlation between the serum and hair to examine the feasibility of using the hair cholesterol level as an index of the serum cholesterol level. The correlation between the serum cholesterol was 0.86 (r‐value) in patients with hypercholesterolemia. This finding indicates that, in the clinical field, hair could replace serum in cholesterol level measurement. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.