- Reaction score
- 340
You can actually kill safe, donor area hair (the one on the sides and back of your head which is supposedly resistant to androgens) by giving it sufficiently high amounts of T & DHT (essentially mimicking what is happening in balding follicles):
Effect of 5α-Dihydrotestosterone and Testosterone on Apoptosis in Human Dermal Papilla Cells
Thus, we investigated the influence of T and 5α-DHT on proliferation, cell death and bcl-2/bax expression in cultured dermal papilla cells (DPC) from nonbalding scalp regions of healthy volunteers. ... T and 5α-DHT induced apoptosis in DPC in a dose-dependent and time-related manner; in addition a necrotic effect due to T at 10–5M was found. ... These data suggest that DPC from nonbalding scalp regions do have the capacity to undergo apoptosis, but need a high androgen stimulus.
In other words, there is nothing particularly fancy or sensitive about the hairs on the top of your head, other than that they synthesize and are exposed to way too high amounts of androgens on a constant basis - the genetic aspect probably explains why some of these key enzymes and proteins regulating androgen synthesis are so imbalanced in these follicles.
But the underlined sentence is kind of ambiguous, it could be saying something other than how you're reading it. It could be saying that safe region hairs can bald, but they need a higher androgen stimulus than balding region hairs. So there sill could be a sensitivity difference.
Do you or anyone else know which reading is correct? Because if they safe region hairs are just as sensitive to androgens as balding region hairs, that would suggest that hairs are EXCLUSIVELY affected by DHT that they themselves generate (otherwise transplanted hairs would meet the same faith as other hairs in that region), which would be very interesting.
Finally, I will leave you with this paragraph from 1987, just so you get an idea of how long this has been known, and how little has been done about it:
View attachment 145731[3]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC52442/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14556282/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3598212/
Hmm... they say tht EpiT both inhibits 5AR and competes for the AR, but doesn't have any sides. I don't see how that could be so, given the sides ppl see with finasteride.
Maybe it hadn't been tested on enough people at the time to see sides.