Baldness may be fully reversible - study
- Thread starter RStGeorge
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Concluding remark,
"A better understanding of the root causes of male pattern baldness may spur the discovery of treatments for this distressing condition"
It is correct right now.
"A better understanding of the root causes of male pattern baldness may spur the discovery of treatments for this distressing condition"
It is correct right now.
The thread is actually titled "Baldness may be fully reversible - study"
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I think that he means the sub-section. We already know that baldness is reversible for many people. The issue is the sides so I am not sure that this article, which is more like a blurb and yes, I read it, is particularly pertinent to anyone's current issues except to state that theoretically there might be a way to "cure" baldness. The other issue is that with the exception of the inflammatory aspects, baldness is probably not a disease to be "cured" but more of an artifact of male aging and maturation which usually begins around the same time as beard growth in caucasians. Other races often have less or even no beard growth and much less balding or in the case of Native Americans, virtually none of either.
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I have to agree here, I noticed balding when I started to grow a beard. (When I was 13/14 years old.) Its translateable to the animalian kingdom. Lions have a mane because of testosterone, lioness do not, the opposite goes for the human's.
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With some whites and Semitic peoples, it can almost be uncanny how the beard growth is all but approximate to the hair loss in volume. It's almost as though the body maintained the hair but just moved it southward and made the hair more coarse. It's difficult to find any evolutionary reason for this shifting of hair priorities by the body but beards are quite protective in terms of being outdoors in the brambles and thistles of a hunter-gatherer society as it is also accompanied by a general thickening and leathering aspect to skin in general between XX's and XY's.
But one would think that scalp hair would be protective too so this is just all conjecture. You could say that it promotes the absorption of vitamin D from the sun but then why wouldn't XX's benefit also from losing hair on top? Perhaps their skin in general more easily lets vitamin D through so they don't need the bald dome on top but again, this is just conjecture. Other peoples associated with living in Northern regions like some Asians, Siberians and Native Americans don't usually go bald so again the Vitamin D hypothesis seems incomplete. It might be just a mutation that is aggressive in terms of being spread so this might explain growing alopecia in China and other Asian countries.
It would be interesting to examine the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA sequences to see how the hair genes of which there are several in humans, compare.
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I think alopecia was genetically present in many human races for a very long time, but never really had an evolutionary impact because it tended to appear in what was late life for early humans, which we now consider pre-mid life today.
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That's a good point but we also can tend to forget that ultimate life expectancy hasn't changed that much among homo sapiens. Things get skewed due to the high rates of infant mortality, disease and deaths in war, etc.
In the five minute university of Guido Sarducci, we only learn what we remember 20 years after college and for Thomas Hobbes, this is it, this is all we will remember from our introduction to poly sci or whatever:
"No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." So said Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan.
Those groups have less facial hair. Native Americans had little or none.
Africans didn't need more sun exposure at all. They have more Norwood#1s than any other major group.
The genes have been mixing a lot in the last couple thousand years. And the differences were probably never 100% even thousands of years ago. But the general trend of the Vitamin D idea holds. Baldness hit hardest in races that lived in cold climates + had heavy facial hair. Nobody else balds anywhere near as much.
This theory explains women too. They don't have facial hair and they don't bald no matter what race they are.
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I disagree I rarely see any 35+ African male who is isn’t balding. Every single Ethiopians bald at a young age Hairloss is seen in every ethnicity just in different forms. The best hair I ever seen is Pakistani men (zayn Malik example)
Would be interested to know how your theory explains FPB.
Tons of human gene mixing in the last several thousand years. If you are picking this hypothesis apart on specific examples then you're missing the larger picture I am getting at.
Yes, I know this functions as an excuse to defend a weak correlation. But this is the human race's current condition. It's generally accepted that some races are prone to more androgenic hair loss than others. Caucasians get the most. Africans & Native Americans get the least. These generalizations have been around for decades.
Offhand ideas:
Ethiopia - For an African country they are pretty close to Europe & Asia.
Pakistan - I dunno. I suppose it's not as cold & dark as the northern European areas.
I haven't heard your hypothesis yet.
Female pattern baldness? Androgenic hair loss is a complex interaction between a bunch of genes + the endo system. There are going to be some surprises.
Why do some women get noticeable facial hair? It certainly doesn't seem to be part of nature's design description for them. It's obviously another "goof up" when it happens, like when women get noticeable androgenic hair loss.
BTW, look at the women's Ludwig pattern vs the male Norwood/Hamilton one. I'm guessing natural selection has already done some early work on female hair loss. When it does happen, the pattern keeps it less visible for as long as possible.
Whereas male androgenic loss is right out in the open with major frontal recession. The Norwood#2-3 forelock (and the Norwood#4-5 "island") preserves just enough hair to keep a face-framing effect and nothing more. The receding temples help expose a lot of bare skin to the sky. Same with crown thinning in the middle Norwood levels - it's an ideal way to expose skin to the sky while maintaining some face-framing hair. Nature is compromising between exposing the scalp and making some token efforts to reduce the damage to physical appearance.
These are not perfect explanations for the Norwood levels (some men recede straight back with no forelock or island) but it's something. I don't hear any other ideas to explain this stuff at all. There are many different patterns/progressions for androgenic loss, but they all seem to agree on one thing - nature has absolutely no interest in balding the lower half of the head. Only the upper half.
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Ethiopians and Somalians differ greatly in their genetic make-up from "Black" africans. There is actually a back to Africa theory of tracking DNA and people from those areas are likely to have genes that match non-Africans in many respects. People from former British India are often part Indo-European, part Semite and perhaps part Dravidic and baldness can run rampant among some folks from this huge swathe of humanity which is larger than China in population.
Baldness historically was associated with the Mediterranea Sea and temperate climate and it appears to lessen as one travels further away from this region. Obviously, we have a mix of Gallic, Germanic, Italic, Greek, Slavic and Semitic peoples who have mixed in this region and all throughout Europe. The various genes for baldness might indeed be dominant genes that "infect" other races and cause baldness in groups previously without it.
I do agree that the connection between beard growth and hair loss seems obvious and I don't know why researchers don't test such variables. But basically humans without beards, including women, children and Native Americans do not go bald and the hair archetypes between male and female are identical.
Baldness historically was associated with the Mediterranea Sea and temperate climate and it appears to lessen as one travels further away from this region. Obviously, we have a mix of Gallic, Germanic, Italic, Greek, Slavic and Semitic peoples who have mixed in this region and all throughout Europe. The various genes for baldness might indeed be dominant genes that "infect" other races and cause baldness in groups previously without it.
I do agree that the connection between beard growth and hair loss seems obvious and I don't know why researchers don't test such variables. But basically humans without beards, including women, children and Native Americans do not go bald and the hair archetypes between male and female are identical.
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Not everything has an evolutionary advantage. Nature isn't perfect. Androgenetic Alopecia isn't the result of a genetic mutation.
inmyhead
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Are you really saying that androgenic alopecia isn't genetic mutation? If so, monkeys (or whatever we evolved from) must have always been bald. Perhaps you mean that Androgenic Alopecia is just unlucky mutation for us instead of genetic advantage?
It's not a single genetic mutation like SCA. It is polygenic, meaning it's just an incidental result of other mutations.
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Hair at the top of your scalp wouldn’t really affect exposure to UV light. Sunlight doesn’t only interact parallel to your body it’s virtually penetrating every inch of your body. I don’t think some keratin protein on the top of your scalp would absorb a significant portion the radiation anyway most would transmit through. otherwise women wouldn’t have the Ludwig pattern and they would also have more skin exposure to the sun.
Hair is compulsory to integument (except glabrous skin which has a different dermal structure) for sending afferent information to your NS about touch, pressure and more. You are assuming hair loss is the wild type trait formed by evolution but it’s a disease state/ result of genetic mutation.