5. Brief Report
Abstract

Hair as an exoskeleton is a unique characteristic of mammals; Human hair is a highly versatile material with significant potential in several areas such as population classification, forensic science for personal identification and also from evolutionary perspectives. Many research reported sexual dimorphism of quantitative characters in adult terminal hair and thereby provided imperatively roles in evolutionary aspects and personal identification. Apart from the three phases to hair growth such as anagen, catagen and telogen phases, the age of hair can be divided into three types such as the first hair, known as lanugo begins to grow on the entire body of the embryo at 3-4 months of pregnancy and falls out within 7-8 months, followed by Vellus and terminal hair. To best of the knowledge this is the first attempt on Histomorphological and Quantitative variation of Lanugo Hair consisted of 250 lanugo hair strands (125 male and 125 females) obtained from spontaneously aborted fetus (around 3 months). Before microscopy for histomorphological (medulation) and quantitative aspects (hair length in mm and Shaft diameter in μm), each hair strands were washed and cleaned following standard technique. The result demonstrated no variation in terms of non-medulated lanugo hairs for both the sexes. With regard to the quantitative characteristic hair length demonstrated significant (p<0.05) sexual dimorphism indicating of higher hair length among the females but shaft diameter did not reveal any variation between the sex. Since, peripheral 5α-reductase activity is increased by local growth factors and circulating androgens and androgen cause a few things to happen during hair development, but their primary role is in converting vellus hairs into terminal hairs. Therefore, the present study envisaged the hormonal influence is not as much effective to produce sexual dimorphism with regard to shaft diameter in the lanugo hair.

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