What does baldness say about heart health?
A Czech proverb says, “A good man grows grey and a rascal bald.”
And Thomas Dekker wrote in The Gull’s Hornbook in 1609, “How ugly is a bald pate! It looks like a face wanting a nose.”
Now, a Japanese report says men with baldness should be less concerned about how it affects their looks. Rather, is the lack of hair associated with increased risk of coronary attack?
The Japanese findings were published online in the British medical journal Open. The study involved 40,000 males whose hair pattern was graded as frontal, crown-top baldness or a combination of the two. The conclusion was not all bald men are created equal.
Men with frontal baldness had a 22 per cent increased risk of coronary disease. For males with crown-top baldness, the risk increased to 52 per cent, and if men had both crown-top baldness and frontal loss of hair, the risk increased to 69 per cent.
This Japanese study is not an isolated one. Harvard researchers also reported a man’s chance of heart disease depends on when hair loss started, how fast it is occurring and that hair loss on the top of the head was more likely to be associated with coronary disease.
Medical literature, however, cites a number of studies that were unable to find a significant association between hair loss and heart disease. Other good news is those with just receding hairlines were not at increased risk of heart trouble.
But what causes baldness? The reason for this loss of hair is not clear. Dr. Tomohide Yamada at the University of Tokyo speculates hormones might play a role and insulin resistance, the forerunner of diabetes, may be implicated since it causes atherosclerosis (hardening of arteries). Atherosclerosis is mentioned in several reports on hair loss and suggests if baldness is present, atherosclerosis should be suspected.
So, what should balding males do, particularly those who lose hair on the top of the head at an early age? They should inquire whether male relatives who suffered hair loss had a coronary at an early age and, if this is the case, start to eliminate as many risk factors as possible that are known to be associated with heart disease.
If further research shows atherosclerosis is a major cause of hair loss, doctors will want to treat it the same way as they treat atherosclerosis in coronary disease. This means 99 per cent of doctors will prescribe cholesterol-lowering drugs (CLDs).
Many readers are aware I had a heart attack 19 years ago and said no to CLDs. Rather, I decided to take high doses of vitamin C and lysine in a product called Medi-C Plus available in health-food stores. I had interviewed Dr. Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel Prize winner, who told me animals make vitamin C and humans lost this ability eons ago due to a genetic mishap.
Pauling explained vitamin C is needed for the manufacture of collagen, the glue that holds coronary cells together. A lack of C means a poor collagen level. Cracks then appear between coronary cells, setting the stage for a fatal blood clot.
Recently, Dr. Sydney Bush, an English researcher, made a monumental discovery. He took photos of the retinal arteries of patients, then gave them 6,000 milligrams of C and 5,000 of lysine. (Lysine adds strength to coronary arteries just like steel rods increase the strength of concrete.) A year later, he repeated the photos. To his surprise, he found atherosclerosis fading away. In effect, vitamin C can prevent and reverse atherosclerosis.
These before-and-after photos are on my website, docgiff.com, and you do not need to be a doctor to see the difference. But remember I am not your doctor. Moreover, long-term double-blind studies will never be done as vitamin C and lysine are natural products that cannot be patented. This means no one is going to spend millions for a study without a profit. But I believed Pauling’s research made sense.
Besides, I’m still alive 19 years later, when cardiologists said I’d be dead in two years without CLDs.