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Medicine Science

Potential New Cure Found For Baldness (bbc.com) 132

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
A potential new cure for baldness has been discovered using a drug originally intended to treat osteoporosis. BBC reports: Researchers found the drug had a dramatic effect on hair follicles in the lab, stimulating them to grow. It contains a compound which targets a protein that acts as a brake on hair growth and plays a role in baldness. Project leader Dr Nathan Hawkshaw told the BBC a clinical trial would be needed to see if the treatment was effective and safe in people. Only two drugs are currently available to treat balding (androgenetic alopecia): minoxidil, for men and women, and finasteride, for men only. Neither is available on the NHS, the national healthcare system for England, and both have side-effects and are not always very effective, so patients often resort to hair transplantation surgery instead.
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Potential New Cure Found For Baldness More

Potential New Cure Found For Baldness

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  • I wonder... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @02:07PM (#56582520)

    I wonder how much one will have toupee for this.

  • I have my own cure (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Itâ(TM)s called âoeshaving my headâ.

    Beats the hell out of a bad combover!

    • 'Bad combover' is redundant.

      Don't start hair transplants, then lose your income.

      I interviewed a dude. Head looked like he had an Island of hair clumps in a lagoon of bald.

      He apparently started the hair transplant thing, then must have given them up as too expensive. He should have shaved his head, cause what he had was just ridiculous.

      I almost wanted to hire him, but no, he was just obviously useless.

      • It's called Male Pattern Baldness for a reason. Some of the patterns are common enough to have names ("Widow's Peak", "Friar Tuck"), but some are just weird and random. The "island" thing is probably a pattern rather than a hair transplant, though I agree, he should have just shaved his head (most of us are in denial about some aspect of our appearance).

        • No, He had his early bald spot covered, then ran out of money.

          The island looked kind of like a nylon brush.

      • The "island" is often the result of a transplant in front of the current hairline, then a few years go by, and the hairline retreats, leaving a skin gap between the transplant and hairline.

        Anyway, I think this new drug is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Instead they should develop a drug that causes women to be attracted to bald men.

      • Oh man, I used to work with this dude.

        He had these implants, and they were little clumps in a pretty regular pattern. It looked like a paddy field.

        You just couldn't avoid looking at them when you were talking to him. Like when a woman has huge boobs and her blouse is open a few buttons too low. Except the other way up.

        And on the partition behind his desk was a poster for something like "Northern Region Unix User Group": NoRuug.

    • Going bald is bad genetics. Shaving your head is a bold style choice.

      • Going bald is bad genetics. Shaving your head is a bold style choice.

        Shaving your head is gene therapy.

      • Shaving your head is a bald style choice.

        FTFY.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gnick ( 1211984 )

        Shaving your head is a bold style choice.

        I've been shaving my head for about 20 years, but I don't feel particularly bold and it has nothing to do with style. If I was a woman it might be bold, but as I guy I don't get a second glance (at least not that I notice.) A comb-over is a bold style choice. So's a toupee. Initially I shaved it for medical reasons, but now I shave it because I'm lazy. No shampoo; no styling. Instead of barbers, I buy new set of $30 clippers from Petsmart every 5 years or so, and those would last longer if I took care of th

        • weak chins and oddly shaped heads.

          If you look somewhat masculine and have a nicely shaved head, yep go for it.

          (otherwise; obviously men won't care.. but you'll be invisible to women if you shave your head or keep the balding look; so really it's up to you.)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by gnick ( 1211984 )

            you'll be invisible to women if you shave your head or keep the balding look

            That hasn't been my experience, but maybe I'm underestimating the influence of my striking good looks and charm. I tell myself that a shaved head projects confidence.

          • weak chins

            You can fix a lot with a strategically grown beard.

          • but you'll be invisible to women if you shave your head

            Depends on your complexion.
            Black guys look fine with no hair.

        • but as I guy I don't get a second glance

          Ditto. I could care less about fashion, but shaved heads are so commonplace nowadays that plenty of guys with full heads of hair shave. It may have started with Yul Brynner, but it really took off with Michael Jordan, Patrick Stewart, and the 1992 U.S. Volleyball Team :-)
          https://www.nytimes.com/1992/0... [nytimes.com]

          I'm 40, and I've been shaving my head for almost 20 years now. I've been bald for so long that I wouldn't want my hair back even if there is a cure.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      I have a full head of hair and I got into super short hair about 20 years ago and eventually said fuck it and shaved my head.

      I love it and would never go back. My male friends with baldness problems have actually told me they're kind of mad that I have hair and I shave it.

      It is literally 5 minutes every other day to keep it shaved.

      You do have to pay attention and wear some cover in the sun, I sunburned my head ONCE and that was all it took to learn that lesson.

      When it's super hot out you also get hotter a

    • I had a friend at college who was a heavy metallist, he had it long when he arrived. By about 20 it was receding seriously. Once it started looking like a Ferengi veil he made the sensible decision to say fuck it and get a number two on what was left.

  • cyclosporine A - transplant rejection drug (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @02:17PM (#56582602) Homepage Journal

    Article says it is "cyclosporine A" which is designed to prevent your body from attacking transplanted organs. That is a pretty serious drug, suppressing your immune system to the point that it mostly ignores giant blobs of foreign meat in your body. I'm sure the wikipedia article will get more fleshed out but the list of side effects sound about as severe as you could imagine.
     
    I'm guessing that this is effective in extremely low doses? All it needs to do is attack a specific protein, I believe.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The article says cyclosporine A was rejected because the side effects are too severe. The new drug is called WAY-316606 at the moment.

    • Re:cyclosporine A - transplant rejection drug (Score:5, Informative)

      by starless ( 60879 ) on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @02:26PM (#56582676)

      Article says it is "cyclosporine A" which is designed to prevent your body from attacking transplanted organs. That is a pretty serious drug, suppressing your immune system to the point that it mostly ignores giant blobs of foreign meat in your body.

      From the article:

      But because of its side effects, CsA was unsuitable as a baldness treatment.

      The team went on to look for another agent that targeted SFRP1 and found that WAY-316606 was even better at suppressing the protein.

      Also, perhaps it's applied topically rather than ingested?

  • Speaking as a folically challenged man, yeah!

  • But does it also prolong and strengthen erections too?

  • Not going to spoil it, just read this article on Finasteride [vice.com] and tell me as technical folks you don't think the research team should be locked up in a dungeon for the rest of their lives for not factoring in the high likelihood of how replicating that process could bring crippling, life-destroying side-effects. That's not "what were you thinking" territory, it's "were you even thinking about anything other than fleecing your patients?"

    • Vice shill. Fuck your click-bait.

    • Re:"Side effects" (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 09, 2018 @02:43PM (#56582806)

      Side effects may include:

      Job promotions, new interest from women, increased social activity, uncontrollable smiling at parties, wind blown hair in the face, hair blowing in the wind, fingers getting caught in hair, sudden urges to flip your head like a stallion and wave thick locks of hair around in slow motion.

      Among others...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Bald guys can be attractive... Maybe helps if you have a British Shakespearian stage accent and a massive starship.

        What sucks is being stuck in the middle, with hair loss that requires lots of effort to either hide or shave completely.

  • Somewhere in a fan-fiction... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Lex Luther was in a pitched battle with a man in a yellow jumpsuit and red gloves. Robot parts and broken walls littered everywhere.

    Suddenly, both men stop. They each take a sneaky glance as their phones.

    Luther: "THIS MUST STOP."

    Saitama: "I ... yeah, I think you've learned your... gotta go bye."

    They both leave deep impact marks in the metal floor as they go for opposite exits.

  • So they know the protein that blocks hair growth? So why not harness it to inhibit beards?

  • I remember several articles years back talking about how the fat in the scalp produces chemicals or an enzyme which produces baldness. Specifically it kills/starves the follicles.

    Also not sure about how well skin fat survives grafting. But theoretically if you could clone these fat cells and transplant them to areas before they become bald the hair would survive. If they also learn to clone hair follicles in the scalp along with regrowing the right fat cells it would be a cure for baldness.

    Decades away but

  • This isn't a Y DO /. CAREZ moment but literally who cares? Baldness isn't a serious situation. I'm not bald yet but when I start to show (which honestly I think will be sooner rather than later contrary to what my family is trying to tell me) I'll just shave it off and call it a day. I shaved bald in middle school every other month or so and it wasn't a big deal. I mean we have cures for baldness and erectile dysfunction but it's scary how many things that matter we've made like no progress on. The horror

    • Congratulations on fulfilling the prophecy of another poster.

      This "cure" for baldness came out of the research for a treatment for another serious condition: osteoperosis. The "cure" for ED came out of research looking for a new drug for saving heart attack patients.

      These researchers didn't set out to find a cure for hair loss, they just happened upon a candidate for one. Are they supposed to just toss that back? And why, because you say so?

    • Baldness isn't a serious situation.

      It is to the drug manufacturers.
      Johnson and Johnson made serious billions from Rogaine.

      • Baldness isn't a serious situation.

        It is to the drug manufacturers. Johnson and Johnson made serious billions from Rogaine.

        I'm not saying it's not lucrative. I'm saying it isn't serious and we should stop putting so much effort into worrying about it so that drug companies won't find it so lucrative.

  • I was mostly bald by age 30, and then I began to realize why: the hair had been silently migrating from my scalp to my nose and other places. I frankly look better with no hair up top, but can I get a treatment that puts a brake on that hair growth?

  • ... The research, published in PLOS Biology, was done in a lab, with samples containing scalp hair follicles from more than 40 male hair-transplant patients...

    The stuff got research attention because the patient population includes, or is primarily compose of, guys. Like erectile dysfunction. For that we've got at least 14 drugs [drugs.com]. Coincidentally, all the doctors listed on the paper [plos.org] appear to be men. If it had been for uterine cancer, endometriosis, IBS, fibromyalgia or any of a host of female-specific

    • Why don't you compare the amount of funding breast cancer gets vs prostate cancer? I don't see people marching for my gdam prostate!

    • You missed the part where they started out trying to find a better treatment for Osteoporosis, which is more common in women, who also start out with less bone mass and have less tolerance for losing it.

      But good job knocking the ever-living shit out of a straw man and projecting gender-malice where it probably doesn't exist. They didn't find a treatment for Osteoporosis, but in the process they may have found something therapeutic for another condition - are they supposed to just throw that one back?

      What a

  • Just an FYI....

    This is not a potential cure for baldness. It is a potential cure for GOING bald IN THE FUTURE (or when it just starts). If my understanding is correct, once you have lost your hair, most of those follicles die and can never produce hair again. So those of us (me included) who have already lost a lot of hair (for years), this drug (or any other known drug) would do pretty much nothing. Our only current recourse is hair transplant.

  • I got over it, it terrified me for years before I started losing it, that I got all the stress out early.

    If there was a baldness fix, you can _bet_ your bottom god damn dollar, the price will be utterly extravagant. Some men would damn near kill to have their hair back, so they'll gladly pony up.

    Make it a one off thing (not some ongoing drug concoction) about I dunno, under 1k$? Ok fine, otherwise, I'm good.

  • Is to not be so fucking vain, and realize that your personality, masculinity and worth as a human being does not reside in your hair. You're not Samson, dude.

    Rock the buzzcut instead, it takes me 5 minutes every 2-3 days with a cheap electric trimmer. Or shave it completely, which is actually easier than shaving facial hair. With a bit of practice you can even shave in the shower.

    Or rock the male pattern baldness like a boss. Look at Ed Harris, he's rocking it and there's no insecurity there.

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