WE KNEW BALDNESS WAS HEREDITARY, NOW WE KNOW HOW IT HAPPENS
Most guys look at old photos of their fathers to see if and when they will go bald. However, research shows that at least some cases of male pattern baldness are passed via the X chromosome, so you might want to blame your mother. No matter how it happens, statistics show that by the mid-50s, 85 per cent of us are going to be combing less hair then we had as teenagers.
Bald can be sexy. Look at Bruce Willis, Steve Harvey and Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. Then again, there’s Homer Simpson, Louis C.K. and a certain U.S. president who seems to have hair issues.
If you just can’t stop wondering if Donald Trump’s hair is real, Eames Yates of Business Insider UK got an expert to do a remote analysis of the presidential pate. The verdict, according to Chicago hair transplant surgeon William D. Yates, M.D. : “I would say, from looking at previous pictures, he’s had a flap, which means that hair from the side of the head has been rotated over to the front to give the thick hairline.” Dr. Yates also thinks Mr. Trump has had additional grafts to give his hair more thickness.
Things may be about to change for future baldies, thanks to a serendipitous discovery at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. Researcher Lu Q. Le was investigating neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic disease where tumours grow on nerve cells. On the way, he seems to have found the process that causes hair to go grey as well as the mechanism behind hair loss. At least, in mice.
Writing in the journal Genes and Development, Le and colleagues found that a protein called KROX20, along with another called Stem Cell Factor (SCF), work together to help hair progenitor cells do their job. By genetically removing KROX20 from mice, the rodents progressively grew grey hairs. Taking away SCF caused total baldness.
According to the researchers, the effects were dramatic. In mice without KROX20, “their coat colour underwent a dynamic change from black to white within 9 months.” Can this be applied to humans? Le says yes, and “we hope in the future to create a topical compound or to safely deliver the necessary gene to hair follicles to correct these cosmetic problems.”
In what may be a shorter time horizon, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have made a breakthrough in converting adult cells into epithelial stem cells. They say this is the first time this has been done in humans or in mice. Xiaowei Xu, M.D., started with dermal fibroblasts, adult human skin cells. By tweaking three genes, he converted them into induced pluripotent stem cells which can become new hair follicles.
This approach is very promising, although Xu notes that it’s not quite ready for humans yet. There’s another key ingredient in growing hair, a kind of stem cell called dermal papillae.
“When a person loses hair, they lose both types of cells.” Xu explains. “We have solved one major problem, the epithelial component of the hair follicle. We need to figure out a way to also make new dermal papillae cells, and no one has figured that part out yet.”
No reporting of advances based on stem cells would be complete with a warning. Because they are so promising, and almost magical, fraudsters have jumped on the bandwagon with bogus stem cell clinics. There are actually only a few approved stem cell therapies, such as Holocar, which is used in patients with burns to the cornea, the transparent layer at the front of the eye.
According to the European Medicines Agency, which has approved this treatment, it uses the patient’s own stem cells which are “then grown in a laboratory so that they can be used to repair the damaged corneal surface.”
This is a far cry from the ads you will find all over the Internet, touting “stem cell therapy” for everything from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) to multiple sclerosis (MS) and, yes, baldness. The trusted website WebMD has a cautionary tale about a woman who paid US$27,000 for unsuccessful stem cell treatments for her MS in Tijuana, Mexico.
Another sad tale on WebMD involves Stephen Byer, who took his son Ben to China for stem cell therapy for his ALS. “The unproven procedure could have killed Ben,” reports WebMD senior medical writer Daniel J. DeNoon. “It didn’t — but it also didn’t work.”
There’s an excellent, sciencebased Patient Handbook on stem cell therapies available at http:// www.closerlookatstemcells.org. It tells you to steer clear of ones with patient testimonials or that cost a lot of money. Usually, we can just say “if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.” But with the almost magical properties of stem cells, you do have to have an open mind.
Hear that, Mr. Trump?
Dr. Tom Keenan is an award winning journalist, public speaker, professor in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary, and author of the best-selling book, Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy.