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Gene Research Gives Hope of Reversing Baldness
Hair loss in humans might not be irreversible, suggest scientists who have helped create new hair cells on the skin of mice. It was thought hair follicles, once damaged, could never be replaced. A University of Pennsylvania team, writing in the journal Nature, say hair growth can actually be encouraged using a single gene.
Actually, it doesn't.
If you're lucky, Rogaine (minoxidil) will help you keep the hair you have, and maybe grow a little hair back (not to mention, grow hair -on- your back, because the drug is absorbed systemically).
It also tends to work only on your bald spot. Receding hairlines do not suddenly un-recede (proceed?).
Also, what grows back tends to be a thin and sickly kind of hair. That is because, at the cellular level, baldness is actually an inflammatory condition, and while Rogaine addresses the symptoms of arrested hair growth, it does nothing to cure the underlying disease process, for which no effective treatment exists currently.
In a nutshell, Rogaine tricks dying hair follicles into sputtering out a little more mane, but they're still dying at the root.
And (the best part), if it works at all, it's good only as long as you use it religiously. Lapse, and what hair you were maintaining with the drug, promptly falls out within a few months.
The follicle inflammatory response in baldness seems to be triggered by genetic sensitivity to a metabolite of male hormones (androgens). The other drug you've probably heard about, Propecia, attempts to block these sensitive androgen receptors, whose activation by the metabolite precipitates the inflammation. But it too is imperfect and rife with the potential for sexual side effects, no matter what the literature says.
Rogaine, like so many other medicines, is a crude, high-cost, brute-force fix to a complex, genetically predisposed condition, so perhaps a genetic fix is the best hope.