The traps and pitfalls inherent in the correlation of changes in the fibre diffraction pattern of hair with breast cancer

After a correlation between breast cancer and changes in the fibre x-ray diffraction of hair was first published, a number of groups reported their failure to reproduce this phenomenon. There is evidence that these failures resulted from either diffraction images of insufficient quality or analysis techniques unable to distinguish features resulting from the presence of breast cancer from those resulting from mechanical damage. Using an independent analysis of the same dataset reported by one of these unsuccessful groups, the author demonstrates some of the critical flaws inherent in this type of intensity-based analysis.