The question is, why do some men keep their hair well into old age while others begin losing their hair at a young age?
A Genetic Problem?
For the majority of men who are losing their hair before they'd like to, the response is genetic. Hair loss, like eye color, is an innate characteristic. While you were still forming in the womb, your hair follicles were being genetically coded. If genes responsible for hair loss were there, they made the hair follicles on top of your head susceptible to the hormone dihydrotestosterone, or DHT. These follicles were then inclined to begin shrinking when you reached adulthood.
Regrettably, once this genetic process starts, it will carry on all through your lifetime. As the hairs produced by your ever-shrinking follicles become finer and finer, they will begin failing to grow to normal length. And what is first noticed as "thinning hair" or a "receding hairline" progresses to baldness when the shrinking follicles finally stop producing any hair at all.
Popular Misconceptions
For many years our schools have taught — quite erroneously — that hair loss is always inherited from the mother's father. Medical science now knows that baldness genes are passed down from both sides of the family. They also can skip generations, and are utterly random in terms of which siblings they will affect; it is quite common for a man keep a full head of hair while his brother goes bald in his twenties.
How Important Is Hair Care?
In contrast to widespread belief, hair loss is not caused by a failure to take good care of your hair. People waste millions of dollars on shampoos and phony, non-FDA approved treatments. (Only two medications, Rogaine and Propecia, have ever been approved by the FDA to treat hair loss.) We have counseled too many men who held themselves to blame for their hair loss. It is essential to understand that with very few exceptions our hair follicles are going to live or die by their genetic coding — and nothing else.
Medical science is still looking for a complete understanding of the biochemical processes that take place within our hair follicles. This was all that we had to talk about hair loss and we hope that you found the entire commentary helpful.
