Later that year it was independently described as "spun-glass hair" by J.D. Stroud and A.H. Mehregan. The currently used term was coined in the early 1980s. However, the UHS phenotype was recorded well before the first literature report in 1973. A children’s story published in Germany in 1845 detailed a character named “Struwwelpeter” or “Shockheaded Peter,” presumably to describe the frizzy nature of a patient’s hair with UHS. This children’s story was later translated by Mark Twain and the character was instead called “Slovenly Peter.”Evidence of familial transmission of UHS prior to 1973 also comes from case studies. In 1983, Garty et al. described the case of a 2-year-old boy whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all said to have the same condition at a young age—difficulty combing their hair. In 1993, Zanca and Zanca found a book from 1912 that details the observations, made by Le Double and Houssay (in their book “Les Velus”), of people with “mop hair” that does not tolerate combing. Current research
The American Hair Research Society studies hair growth disorders and possible treatments for them. In addition to UHS, these disorders include alopecia areata, telogen effluvium, cicatricial alopecia, female and male pattern hair loss, trichotillomania, and hair shaft defects. The society was founded in 1989 by a group of dermatologists and has grown to include general physicians, scientific researchers, and other collaborative partners to advance research on human hair. It is one of the only non-profit research centers on hair disorders in the Americas.
With this experiment, they performed a process called immunoblotting and immunofluorescence. With immunoblotting, it appeared that the transfected cells had a marginally lower expression of the mutant compared to the wild-type. With immunofluorescence it resulted in an irregular intracellular location of the protein. Therefore, it helped conclude that there was a reduction in enzymatic action that encodes a protein to hair shaft arrangement, which relates to central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia(CCCA). Diagnosis
Differential diagnosis
Other syndromes with hair abnormalities may also show features of uncombable hair syndrome such as Rapp–Hodgkin ectodermal dysplasia syndrome, loose anagen syndrome, EEC syndrome (ectodermal dysplasia, ectrodactyly and cleft lip/palate) and familial tricho-odonto-onychial ectodermal dysplasia with syndactyly. However, unlike these conditions, uncombable hair syndrome alone is not associated with physical, neurologic, or mental abnormalities.According to the U.S. National Institute of Health, the condition tends to develop in childhood (age 3-12) and resolve by adolescence.Another observation that can be made when detecting uncombable hair syndrome in individuals is by observing the hair shaft under a special microscope. When individual hair strands are being viewed, the hair is triangular or kidney-shaped and has a longitudinal groove on one or two faces.Clinical diagnosis of UHS can be confirmed molecularly by performing high-resolution microscopy on hair shafts using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). SEM allows for the visualization of hair shaft cross-sections, which can appear triangular, heart-shaped, kidney-shaped, flat, or longitudinally grooved. Interestingly, multiple different cross sections can appear on a single shaft of hair.