On January 11, 1896, Thomson and Hewlett, from the Department of Bacteriology of the , published in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in history, The Lancet, the first known article on nose hairs.
Called vibrissaebecause they come from the Latin vibrissae -ārum, which means nose hairsand all mammals have them, although in many of them they are born from the upper lip.
In humans they are those short hairs that are found in the nostrils, which from time to time cause us to itch and that some people shave.
An affirmation that we have taken for granted for more than a century
Well, in that article from the late 19th century, researchers claimed that nose hair filters the air we breathe and thus protects us from infection by airborne viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens.
And we could almost say that that theory was received as true by the population, and it has been repeated almost to this day.
The statement was also supported by evidence such as that the interior of the vast majority of normal nostrils is completely aseptic while right at the beginning, in the vestibules, the vibrissae that cover them and all the scabs that form there are generally riddled with bacteria.
So it was not difficult to think that it was precisely the vibrisas that were in charge of filtering and keeping the bad stuff, for .
Of course, no one had done the opposite test, that is, no one had shaved the nose hairs and investigated the inside some time later, to see if the germs were inside the respiratory tract.
New research, in 2011, reaffirms
More than a century after that statement, specifically in 2011, a new study appeared regarding vibrissae.
It was published by a team of researchers from Turkey in the International Archives of Allergy and Immunology. And after rigorous analysis with patients, they concluded that people with denser nose hair were less likely to have asthma.
Again in the same line of what was stated 115 years before.
But this was only an observational study, and while they attributed this finding to the filtering function of nose hair, they had no data to prove a cause-and-effect relationship.
In 2015, a study from the Mayo Clinic brings more clarity
And stubborn in the error, we had to wait until 2015 to know the reality.
That year, researchers at the Mayo Clinic conducted what has truly been the first and only scientific study on the subject, published in the journal American Journal of Rhinology and Allergy.
It was about observing the effects of trimming nose hair. And what the researchers did was they measured nasal airflow in 30 patients, before and after they got their nose hair trimmed.
Analyzing the data, they found that trimming produced improvements in subjective and objective measures of nasal airflow.
And perhaps most surprising to many, they saw greater improvements in those who had more nose hair before waxing.
But was it a conclusive analysis? Well, the truth is that I did not quite answer the question of whether the hairs in the nose have an important job, and if there is a correlation between a greater flow of nasal air and a greater risk of infection.
This study also did not address this question directly. But Dr David Stoddardlead author of the Mayo Clinic research, did have his own conclusion, which he expressed graphically:
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“If a person works with drywall, for example, I can tell if they just got off work by the white dust I’ll see stuck in their nose hairs. But there will be trapped only the largest particles. And viruses are much smaller. Too small to not get through the nose hairs.
And after this observation, he stated:
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“I don’t think plucking nose hair puts a person at higher risk of respiratory infection.”
So it is possible that a historical myth is falling, but we do not have many more scientific certainties to maintain a belief that lasts more than a century.
Does this mean they are useless?
Absolutely. In the human body we have nothing that does not have a meaning, a reason and a function.
In the case of vibrissae or nose hairs, their fundamental job is to achieve a loss of charge of the air that we inspire, which helps to avoid complications caused by debris that can reach the lungs. They can even shut out some parasites.
What they cannot do is block the way for viruses, bacteria… which are microscopic.
But the vibrissae are so important that are present in virtually all animals. Even sea sponges have hairs with which to filter the water.