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Bosley Medical
Boca Raton
5355 Town Center Road,
Suite 402
Boca Raton, FL 33486
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From Newswire
To Be or Not to Be Bald: Can You Really Choose?
Bosley Medical, the Leader in Hair Restoration, Addresses the Baldness Gene
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., Jan. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- Nature or nurture? The chicken or the egg? Is the baldness gene from your mother or your dad? Such are the conundrums of life. One that may have a definitive answer concerns baldness, once again a hot topic in the lifestyle media (Oprah, 7-05). The debate continues whether bald is beautiful and whether men prefer to be bald rather than sport the dreaded comb-over (The National Hair Journal, Summer 2005). "While you can't choose whether or not you will become bald, many men can now choose whether or not to stay bald," says Ken Washenik, M.D., Ph.D., Medical Director of Bosley Medical.
"Sometime in the future, baldness will be a choice rather than something you have to suffer. Any bald people will have chosen to be bald," Paul Kemp,Chief Scientific Officer, Intercytex, Manchester England (conducting research in hair cloning).
"For a long time, it was assumed that people inherited baldness from their mother's side of the family. This 'myth' was eventually debunked along with the theory of tight hats and poor circulation. Baldness is now generally thought to come from either side of the family as in inherited trait," saysDr. Washenik of Bosley Medical.
The tide has turned once again as German scientists suggest that current research shows the culprit to be your mother's X chromosome, which affects the androgen receptors, the protein that activates male hormones (American Journal of Human Genetics, 7-05). Whatever the final answer, genetic male pattern baldness appears in 95 % of all cases (American Medical Association Medical Library, 1999) and there doesn't seem to be a choice in the matter. However, there is a choice about living with baldness or correcting it surgically with follicular unit transplantation.
A great percentage of men suffering from male pattern baldness are candidates for the cosmetic outpatient procedure, which is becoming more and more popular as myths about hair plugs and artificial appearance recede into the distant past. The results are now natural-looking and permanent. With hair multiplication on the horizon (hair "cloning"), the choice will be more widespread as hair restoration becomes available to a greater percentage of the balding population. With either solution, man indeed triumphs over nature and exerts his or her choice to be, or not to be, bald.
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