Strands of hair can unlock key clues about toxic environmental exposures

By the time many diseases are diagnosed, the damage may have been building for years.

What if you could identify harmful exposures while there was still time to do something about them?

A new technology is helping scientists do just that, using something you might never expect.

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The flames that tore through the Pacific Palisades, California, were impossible to ignore. What they set in motion wasn't.

Thousands of families returned home after the fire swept through their neighborhoods, with a question no air monitor or home inspection could fully answer: What invisible toxins were they being exposed to?

Elissa Ashwood became a grandmother just a month after the fire hit her neighborhood in Palisades. She told us it's hard not to worry about what it left behind.

"I am balancing protecting that little one and my kids with needing to work on our home," she said.

Ashwood's home is still standing, but it's heavily damaged. She goes inside with a hazmat suit to sort her belongings, because while the smoke and debris are clear, the invisible toxic footprint is not.

We were there as she sorted beloved dolls and Christmas mugs scorched in the fire.

Meantime, her body is keeping a record of potentially hazardous exposures.

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She unlocked that record by cutting a few strands of hair, sealing it in a tube, and sending it across the country.

It's not because hair holds the answer; it's because hair holds the history.

For more than two decades, environmental epidemiologist Manish Arora has been developing a way to understand it.

"A blood test is a snapshot," Arora said. "Our hair platform is like a molecular movie."

This summer, his company launched "Traced," a take-home consumer test to measure a set of environmental elements over 30 days, exposing what we're exposed to: in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the places we live.

We visited the lab to observe how their technology can split a single hair lengthwise, allowing Arora's team to analyze tiny layers that form as it grows, like rings on a tree, and showing what the body was exposed to over time.

That's because our health is shaped by more than the DNA we're born with. Arora believes revealing our most concerning exposures to everything from heavy metals and pesticides to microplastics and other chemicals may be one of medicine's next big leaps.

"About 60 to 70% of your longevity is not determined by your genes," he continued. "It is determined by your environment, what exposures you experience."

Elissa Ashwood discovered that she'd been exposed to high levels of lead, likely, she said, from inhaling microscopic toxic residues from the thousands of items incinerated during the fire.

That knowledge, she said, allowed her to talk to her healthcare providers about how to protect herself and help her body get rid of the metals most effectively.

She told us that as the cleanup continues, she'll keep testing to track what and how much she's exposed to, as she protects her past memories and her family's future.

"I think it's one of the few really positive things to come out of this disaster," said Ashwood.

To learn more about the "Traced" kit, click here.