Month: January 2023

Hey doc, how’s it going? I’ve stumbled across this article on MSNBC.

I don’t want to get my hopes up too high, but the identification of a gene linked to hair loss sounds like an important discovery. What’s your take on it?

I had many people send me that MSNBC article yesterday, and my take on this is the following —

I think it is great that a possible hair loss gene may have been identified, but that does not necessarily solve the problem of genetic balding in the short term. It will help focus the research on the mechanism that have heretofore not been well understood. It is a step in the right direction, for sure. I’m looking forward to seeing where this discovery will take us.

Other articles about this can be found here:

• Gene behind hair loss identified
• Scientists find genetic keys to inherited hair loss

Snippet from the article:

A mechanic has been jailed for four years on drug charges although he claimed in court that he was only taking medication to stop the recurring headaches he had been suffering ever since a hair transplant procedure.

The Dubai Court of First Instance jailed the 35-year-old Pakistani mechanic after convicting him of smuggling and possessing 0.06 grames of methamphetamine for personal consumption.

Read the full story — Convict claims drug was only medicine

Blaming your meth use on a cosmetic surgery? Good one. Unless his dealer was his surgeon, I can’t see how the use of meth and a hair transplant can be connected.

Snippet from the article:

GREY hair may be unwelcome, but the processes that produce it are now better understood and could be protecting us from cancer.

Cells called melanocytes produce the pigments that colour hair and their numbers are kept topped up by stem cells. Hair goes grey when the number of stem cells in hair follicles declines. Now Emi Nishimura of Tokyo Medical and Dental University in Japan and colleagues have found what causes this decline in mice.

Read the rest at NewScientist – Grey hair may be protecting us from cancer

This is a long stretch from a prominent researcher. I will not celebrate my gray hair because of this article.

Snippet from the press release —

In a new research report published online in The FASEB Journal people who are going gray develop massive oxidative stress via accumulation of hydrogen peroxide in the hair follicle, which causes our hair to bleach itself from the inside out, and most importantly, the report shows that this massive accumulation of hydrogen peroxide can be remedied with a proprietary treatment developed by the researchers described as a topical, UVB-activated compound called PC-KUS (a modified pseudocatalase).

Read the rest — Gray hair and vitiligo reversed at the root

This is a interesting discovery, that gray hair is caused by peroxide bleaching the hair at the root. If it is true, anything that can remove the peroxide will reverse gray hair. The author showed that catalase (a known enzyme that catalyzes the hydrolysis of peroxide) can reverse the gray hair.

Snippet from the article:

Scientists have identified the gene that keeps females female. An international team found that the action of a single gene is all that stops females from developing male physical traits, including testes and facial hair.

When this gene was artificially “switched off” in adult female mice their ovaries began to turn into testes and they started to produce a level of testosterone found in healthy male mice.

Read the full article at TimesOnline UK

Maybe this type of finding will give us insights to those people who express the genes for hair loss in a somewhat random generation ‘skip’ pattern. Regardless, this is very interesting and exciting news!