Slashdot Mirror
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.
i'm not nearly as distressed by the hair i'm losing as much as by the hair that seems to grow more and more rapidly where i don't want it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
If people were just as kind and fair to the beautiful as to the ugly, then I might agree with you.
But they are not.
Has some latest research links.
a rch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldness#Latest_rese
They found some genes from Russians. Now they need to work on the drugs. Said something about enzymes being key.
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.
Clearly medical research as a whole is irrelevant until we solve world hunger; spaceships, cars, and the internet are even more irrelevant. Progress is progress, how do you know that their research into this gene won't help cancer down the road?
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
Insightful? My hiney!
Aren't scientists allowed to work on projects of lesser importance until all important problems are solved? If not, the ultimate consequence would be that we compile a list of all problems, sort them and don't start working on number 2 until we've solved number 1.
Secondly it is not as if nothing has been accomplished in cancer research. In the begining of the 20th century having cancer meant a certain death, these days you have a chance depending on the kind of cancer and how far it has progessed. Let's face it, cancer is hard to cure.
An finally you (and others in this thread) seem to think that baldness and erectily dysfunctions are minor problems. Having a problem like that can have a severe inpact on your chances of reproducing so I'd say they're no minor issues.
Funny thing though. In this week's Nature there is this article where American scientists speculate on an alternative method to promote de novo follicle growth [in mice] via... grazing of the scalp.
I quote the scoop from the New Scientist's entry:
Could a graze on the head help cure baldness? Biologists had thought that once mammals lose their hair follicles, they are gone forever. Now George Cotsarelis at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and his colleagues have shown that adult mice can regenerate follicles when their skin is wounded.
The team cut out a square centimetre of skin from the backs of mice two weeks after their hair follicles had formed. After 14 to 19 days the wounds had closed and formed new. When the researchers added Wnt proteins - signalling molecules usually involved in embryonic development - the number of follicles doubled and the skin healed with less scarring. This suggests that wound healing may trigger an embryonic state in skin, says Cotsarelis. Surprisingly, the new follicles originate from stem cells that are not usually involved in creating hair follicles.
Cotsarelis hopes the findings could lead to new therapies for baldness. "The idea would be to disrupt the skin to trigger the embryonic pathways, and then come in with the Wnt proteins," he says.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
I'm still 0 out of 100 somethin' and counting.
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos