Have you ever heard about elemental hair in which a sample of your hair is tested for levels of harmful and nutritional minerals in your body? It is a diagnostic test that has been around for some 40 years, used by alternative practitioners to detect potential health problems long before symptoms even begin to manifest. Considering how easy and noninvasive this valuable diagnostic tool is, wouldn’t be wonderful if our animal companions could also benefit from it? Well, now they can. Thanks to the cooperation between LifelineDiag laboratory and the Department of Animal Nutrition at the University of Agriculture in Cracow in Poland. The laboratory’s many years of experience in the analysis of human hair and the scientific team in animal nutrition led to the development of elemental analysis EHAA, a test for the content of elements in the hair of dogs.
The advantage of EHAA over blood or urine tests
Formerly, the only way you could determine mineral levels in your animal’s body was to order specialized blood or urine tests. But these are not a desirable way to find minerale. Why? Because, for example, when the body is deficient in calcium, the blood „borrows” from the bone to keep the levels up. This means the blood test will reveal normal calcium levels even though there is a deficiency. Meanwhile, the condition of the dog may deteriorate, and the body shows signs of deficiency of this element.
But why would hair tell us so much about what’s going on in the body? It’s because it doesn’t have the ability to keep minerals in homeostasis by attempting to correct imbalances, so elevated or deficient levels show up sooner and more dramatically in hair than in other body tissue. Hair is very sensitive to mineral levels, which is why the EHAA test gives a much more reliable result on the content of elements in the dog’s body than blood or urine tests.
Why is it worth to do an EHAA test?
We know that toxic minerals such as cadmium, aluminum or lead can contribute to illnesses such as cancer, kidney failure, liver disease and neurological conditions, but the problem is that these substances can build up in the body for months or years before they manifest in clinical signs of disease. The level of a toxin in an animal is dependent on exposure, and their ability to detoxify, so even if you have an animal exposed to very low levels of a toxin, if he can’t get rid of it, it just accumulates in the body. And no matter how careful we are, both our animals and ourselves are exposed to many toxins every day.
By revealing elevations of toxic minerals in your animal’s body, hair analysis gives you and your vet the opportunity to correct the imbalances before illness develops.
Nowadays, civilization diseases affect not only people, but also our animals. Check which elements are correlating with them:
Allergy – calcium, magnesium, zinc
Cancer – aluminium, arsenic, cadmium, calcium, copper, iron, lead, magnesium, nickiel, selenium, sodium, zinc
Congestive heart failure – calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium
Diabetes – calcium, chromium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, zinc
Dermatitis – copper, iron, lithium, nikel, selenium, zinc
Obesity – chromium, copper, zinc
Osteoarthritis – lead, selenium, sulfur, zinc
Periodontal disease – calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc
Elemental hair analysis EHAA also provides information on levels of nutritional minerals such as calcium, magnesium, zinc or selenium, and can show when your animal is either lacking or getting too much of a particular mineral. A change in diet or the addition of certain supplements based on the result of EHAA can help fix the problem.
EHAA is a simple and non-invasive test that is worth doing if:
– You are a breeder of purebred dogs or owner of show dogs, you care about their peak form and beautiful appearance,
– You want to check if the diet you offer to your dog provides him with all the necessary minerals,
– Your friend has health problems and needs additional diagnostics,
– You have a dog with a diagnosed disease that requires proper nutrition,
– Your pet is suffering from obesity, digestive problems, skin problems, dental disease, itching or hair loss,
– Your dog is your friend and you want to visibly increase its quality of life with correct diet.
PetsDiag Team
