Bernadette Tansey, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, March 7, 2008
Biotechnology has introduced many wonders to the world. New drugs to treat deadly diseases. Microbes that digest oil spills. Fluorescent fish. Remarkable inventions and all.
But what has biotech ever done for bald people?
Some may feel sheepish raising the question, given the more weightier problems needing a scientific fix. Hair loss is a non life-threatening condition, concedes Kaiser Permanente dermatologist Paradi Mirmirani. But half the population, both male and female, see their locks thinning by age 50 - and many can't take the loss lightly, Mirmirani said.
"I have tearful patients in my office many times a day," she said. "When they lose their hair, they feel they have lost their identity."
That passionate attachment is helping to speed research on new treatments because investors see a potential gold mine in the field. Most health plans don't reimburse for anti-balding drugs or transplants, but many people are willing to pay out their own pockets even if the cost is a bit hair-raising.
Industry sources estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion a year on approved drugs for hair loss and hair transplants.
That explains why a small but determined bunch of companies and academics are mining the hair shaft for clues to the molecular mechanisms of balding. They're throwing an arsenal of high-tech tools at the condition: genome studies, stem cell stimulation, gene therapy, and some tissue engineering often called "hair cloning" and even robotics.
The chance of much better treatments in time for your high school reunion? A big maybe.
Much is still unknown about the phenomenon of balding, a trait that only humans and some monkeys share, said Stanford University Professor Anthony Oro. It's not even clear why humans, over the course of evolution, shed most of their thicker body hair but kept a crop on the head.
For a minority of balding people, some episodes of hair loss stem from diseases such as skin infections and immune system disorders, or stresses like surgery and childbirth. Treatments for such hair loss are often geared to fix the underlying cause.
But by far the most common type of hair loss is the slow, inexorable thinning of the locks on a timetable set by the genes inherited from the father or mother.
Certain genes can make the top of the scalp more vulnerable to a male hormone, dihydrotestosterone or DHT, which shuts down follicles so they don't produce new hairs. The result is male-pattern baldness, which starts with a receding hairline and bald spot. The same interplay of male hormones and heredity can cause a general thinning of hair in women.
Source: Chronicle research
This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Getting To The Roots Of Hair Loss
Science Daily,
Feb. 26, 2008
A Healthy individual can loose around a hundred hairs a day. Nothing to worry about as long as they are constantly replaced and the losses occur evenly around the whole scalp. But when hair loss gets well beyond this level it can become quite a problem for those affected -- not only superficially in terms of looks but also psychologically. A breakthrough on the hair front has now been made by an international research team headed by scientists at the university of Bonn.
After six years of struggling research they have succeeded in identifying a gene that is responsible for a rare hereditary form of hair loss known as Hypotrichosis simplex. The scientists are the first to identify a receptor that plays a role in hair growth. They now hope that their research findings will lead to new drugs hair loss therapies that will work with various forms of hair loss.
"Although Hypotrichosis simplex is quite uncommon, it may prove critical in our search for an understand of the mechanisms of hair growth," says project leader Dr. Regina Betz from Bonn's Institute of Human Genetics, summing up the research results. The disease is inherited and affects both men and women. Sufferers generally begin to go bald during childhood. The process of hair loss (alopecia) then begins advancing with age, especially around the scalp.
The cause of Hypotrichosis simplex in the form examined in the project is a genetic defect. It prevents certain receptor structures on the surface of hair follicle cells from being formed correctly. It has been found that when messengers from outside bind to these receptors they trigger a chain reaction in the cells interior which is apparently needed for the hair follicle to function normally. Such a receptor that plays a specific role in hair growth was previously unknown to scientists.
Key to new drugs to combat hair loss
As Professor Dr. Markus Nöthen, who holds the Chair of Genetic Medicine at Bonn University's Life & Brain Center, explains, "The defective receptor structure falls into the category of what are known as G-protein-coupled receptors." This is great news, because, "they are particularly well suited as points of impact for drug treatments." The researchers have also been able to identify an endogenous messenger that binds in the hair follicle to the receptor.
This opens up opportunities for developing new active agents. Looking to the future, Professor Dr. Ivar von Kügelgen from Bonn's Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology says, "We can now search selectively for related substances that may be used in therapies for hair loss." The exciting possibility here is such medicines will be able to benefit patients suffering from very different types of hair loss.
Another member of the project team has been the dermatologist Dr. Khalid Al Aboud from the King Faisal Hospital in Makkah, was responsible for the clinical case studies. In 2002, he and his colleagues examined a Saudi-Arabian family with Hypotrichosis simplex. The medical scientists were able to analyze DNA samples from the parents and from nine of their ten children -- including four sufferers.
The family's genetic material gave the research project team the key to understanding some of the fundamental mechanisms of hair growth and hair loss. The researchers hope that this individual genetic case will lead to developments that can benefit a far wider circle of patients in the future.
The study is due to appear in the March edition of "Nature Genetics".
The Bald facts: Smokers risk hair loss - as well as fatal illnesses
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Monday, 26 november 2007
Smoking is known to make your legs fall off. Now, it appears, it makes your hair fall out, too – and possibly for the same reasons.
A study of Asian men, renowned for hanging on to their hair compared with follically-challenged Europeans and Americans, found that puffing on cigarettes can hasten male hair loss.
Smoking is known to accelerate ageing and is associated with facial wrinkles and grey hair. It is also causes a dozen other different kinds of cancer and heart disease and damages circulation.
But none of this counts for much with the average red- blooded male – at least not as much as maintaining a healthy head of hair. Unlike grey hairs and wrinkled skin, baldness is harder to treat and harder to disguise. Doctors see the latest discovery as a potentially valuable weapon in the battle to persuade smokers to give up.
Male pattern baldness runs in families and is partly influenced by male sex hormones but it can also be subject to environmental factors. Baldness varies between races, with Asian men less likely to go bald than white Caucasians. But early hair loss in a smoker may be a warning signal of more serious damage elsewhere in the body.
Scientists studied 740 Taiwanese men with an average age of 65. After gathering information about the age at which they started losing their hair, their smoking history , their height and weight, as well as taking blood samples, they found cigarettes led to significantly more hair loss even after taking other factors into account.
The scientists, led by Dr Lin-hui Su, from the Eastern memorial hospital in Taiwan, wrote in the journal Archives of Dermatology: "After controlling for age and family history, statistically significant positive associations were noted between moderate or severe androgenetic alopecia [baldness] and smoking status, current smoking of 20 cigarettes or more per day and smoking intensity."
The researchers suggest that smoking may cause damage the micro-circulation supplying blood to the follicles.
Smoking is already known to increase the tendency of the blood to clot, causing a heart attack if the blood clot blocks a coronary artery or more minor damage if the clot occurs in a peripheral blood vessel, most usually in the legs. Cumulative damage to peripheral blood vessels caused by smoking can ultimately lead to gangrene requiring amputation. More than nine out of 10 cases of peripheral vascular disease which lead to amputation are caused by smoking.