There’s a surprisingly simple way to tell if you’ll go bald
Ella Scott
Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images
There is a straightforward way to discover whether men are going to lose their hair in the future - and all you have to do is dig around in your family archives.
Male pattern baldness, formally known as androgenic alopecia or AGA, is known to be genetically determined. It usually affects the top and sides of the scalp first before eventually progressing towards the back of the head, as per Nice CKS.
It’s understood that around 6.5 million men in the UK will experience male pattern baldness within their lives, with a study claiming Europeans are most likely to succumb, followed by Afro-Caribbeans.
The American Hair Loss Association wrote that around 25 percent of men with hereditary hair loss will experience thinning hair before the age of 21, while 66 percent of men aged 35 will have experienced some degree of it, too.
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But how do you figure out if that’s you?
Essentially, you need to get up close and personal with your father’s scalp, as well as the head of both your maternal grandfathers.
This is because you may have inherited a baldness gene, which will potentially trigger androgenic alopecia.
If your assigned sex at birth was male, then all the X chromosome genes in your body can be traced exclusively to your biological mother, and all the Ys to your father.
It’s on the X chromosome where the gene ‘most strongly associated with baldness’ resides, according to Markus Nöthen, a geneticist at the University of Bonn in Germany.
The expert previously told Vox that if your mother inherited the baldness gene from her father and passed it to you via her X chromosome, then there’s at least a fifty per cent chance you’re going to lose your hair.
However, Dr. Alan J. Bauman, Hair Restoration Physician and founder of Bauman Medical, has also said you can inherit the baldness gene from your father.
“Hair-loss genes can be inherited from either your mother's or father's side of the family, or a combination of the two,” he explained to GQ.
So, the simplest way to figure out if you’re going to go bald is really just looking at your father, both your grandfathers, and perhaps your great-grandfathers’ scalps.
If they’re losing or have lost their hair, then the bad news is you’re likely to shed your locks too.
Looking at photos of when they were younger will also help you determine exactly when you could suffer hair loss. Time to pull out those family photo albums again!
If you want a more accurate result, then doctors can take a swab of DNA from the saliva inside your cheek to test how sensitive you are to dihydrotestosterone (DHT).
This genetic swab will reveal your odds for balding and how quickly you could lose your hair.
It can also predict how you might react to hair-loss medications like Propecia or Finasteride treatment.
Other tests you can undergo include a scalp biopsy, blood tests and the hair pull test, which sees a dermatologist ripping out a small section of hair to assess its strength and the amount of hair shedding.
But let’s be honest, looking at old photographs is way easier and much less evasive.