Discipline: Medicine
The study of trace elements as related to human diseases is almost purely biochemical in nature. Such studies have developed only in the last decade or so because some essential trace elements occur in tissues in such low concentrations that their determination by conventional analytical methods is extremely difficult. Activation Analysis with its high sensitivity removes this difficulty; so much so that research over the last ten years have led to the universal acceptance of the importance of trace elements in human biochemistry and clinical medicine.