How It Works: Baldness

By Edward Herbert

As I sat at my desk brushing my hand through my hair in a tic-like fashion, I noticed a short sparkling hair from my head drop onto my keyboard. In a moment of neuroticism, I started worrying about hair loss. Why do men go bald? Why does it appear that women do not? How come there is still no universal treatment for baldness? And how are bald men perceived in this day and age?

Blame your mother!
Baldness is a fact of life for millions of men around the world. But you might be surprised to know it’s the girls, not the guys, who pass on the baldness gene. The gene is found on the X chromosome, not the Y. And since males (XY) are given the X-gene from their maternal parent, the gene is passed on from the mother (XX). This is not to say that if it runs in your mother’s side of the family that you are certain to go bald, but it does increase your chances.

So do women actually go bald? It turns out as many as 20% of women experience hair loss. But they don’t go bald via the standard ‘M’ pattern at the front and patch on the crown, as men do. Instead they thin evenly and slowly across their full head of hair. Of course, women who go bald are quite likely to wear a wig of some kind, so you may not be able to pick them out in a crowd anyway.

Little Britain’s co-star, Matt Lucas, is bald for an altogether different reason, however - a condition called alopecia, which he has suffered from since the age of six. Alopecia is a rare condition that affects 1%–2% of the population, causing rapid hair loss, usually in patches.

The Norwood-Hamilton scale - invaluable to the researchers of baldyness

Hormones: How it all works
You may be asking yourself, just how do your genes affect your barnet, or lack of? It’s all down to that most famous of hormones – testosterone. When converted to dihydrotestosterone (DHT) by a specialised enzyme, it can disturb hair growth patterns by slowing down the growth, or even causing premature death of, hair follicles.

In younger people, follicles live for an average of around five years before dropping out and being replaced by new ones. DHT progressively reduces the number of hair follicles and eventually results in baldness.

Follicularly challenged
So is there anything you can do if your hair starts falling out? Perhaps. You could try an oral tablet called Finasteride, which works by inhibiting the converting enzyme and therefore preventing DHT from damaging follicle growth. But it doesn’t work for everyone. The other solution, Minoxidil, is sold over the counter as a topical cream for the scalp. Doctors are unsure how it works; it was originally used on heart patients but turned out to increase hair growth too.

Like Sir Elton, many in the limelight have

struggled with the idea of going bald. UK politician Mark Oaten blamed his midlife crisis on losing his hair when, in 2006, his affair with a male prostitute was revealed.

It isn’t all doom and gloom, however. A trawl through countless trashy celebrity sites revealed that “the bald look” could be beautiful after all. One particular article described baldness as symbolising “power, confidence, machismo”, and even “danger”. On this note, I’ll close, now much the wiser on the science behind human baldness, and less daunted by its ravages.

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