Need a big favor. S Foote's theory in a nutshell?

[youngbaldie]

Ok, I have spent the past few weeks, on and off occasionally, trying to sort out the various theories of male pattern baldness. I have tried to understand Armando's 'sebum' theory..if that is the correct terminology. And recently, I have tried to breeze through a lot of S. Foote's older posts back from 2004.

Putting the fear of sounding stupid aside, can somebody please explain Armando's theory and S Foote's in as plain, simple english as possible? The conversations they were having with Bryan, Michael Barry, and others were quite interesting, but far too technical for my simple intellect.

I have already used the search option countless times, and have tried to figure it out on my own, but my head hurts too much after doing that, and I end up even more confused than when I began my quest for knowledge on this issue.

I am not trying to start a flame war here at all. But could somebody be so kind as to sum up S Foote's arguments and theories concisely and clearly? And then perhaps explain how they contrast with the predominant view?

 

[S Foote.]

Ok, I have spent the past few weeks, on and off occasionally, trying to sort out the various theories of male pattern baldness. I have tried to understand Armando's 'sebum' theory..if that is the correct terminology. And recently, I have tried to breeze through a lot of S. Foote's older posts back from 2004.

Putting the fear of sounding stupid aside, can somebody please explain Armando's theory and S Foote's in as plain, simple english as possible? The conversations they were having with Bryan, Michael Barry, and others were quite interesting, but far too technical for my simple intellect.

I have already used the search option countless times, and have tried to figure it out on my own, but my head hurts too much after doing that, and I end up even more confused than when I began my quest for knowledge on this issue.

I am not trying to start a flame war here at all. But could somebody be so kind as to sum up S Foote's arguments and theories concisely and clearly? And then perhaps explain how they contrast with the predominant view?

I have thought myself about trying to explaim my theory in very basic terms to people.

I will post along these lines in this thread in a few days when time permits.

S Foote.

 

[youngbaldie]

Ok, I have spent the past few weeks, on and off occasionally, trying to sort out the various theories of male pattern baldness. I have tried to understand Armando's 'sebum' theory..if that is the correct terminology. And recently, I have tried to breeze through a lot of S. Foote's older posts back from 2004.

Putting the fear of sounding stupid aside, can somebody please explain Armando's theory and S Foote's in as plain, simple english as possible? The conversations they were having with Bryan, Michael Barry, and others were quite interesting, but far too technical for my simple intellect.

I have already used the search option countless times, and have tried to figure it out on my own, but my head hurts too much after doing that, and I end up even more confused than when I began my quest for knowledge on this issue.

I am not trying to start a flame war here at all. But could somebody be so kind as to sum up S Foote's arguments and theories concisely and clearly? And then perhaps explain how they contrast with the predominant view?

I have thought myself about trying to explaim my theory in very basic terms to people.

I will post along these lines in this thread in a few days when time permits.

S Foote.

Thank you.

 

[Cassin]

Ok, I have spent the past few weeks, on and off occasionally, trying to sort out the various theories of male pattern baldness. I have tried to understand Armando's 'sebum' theory..if that is the correct terminology. And recently, I have tried to breeze through a lot of S. Foote's older posts back from 2004.

Putting the fear of sounding stupid aside, can somebody please explain Armando's theory and S Foote's in as plain, simple english as possible? The conversations they were having with Bryan, Michael Barry, and others were quite interesting, but far too technical for my simple intellect.

I have already used the search option countless times, and have tried to figure it out on my own, but my head hurts too much after doing that, and I end up even more confused than when I began my quest for knowledge on this issue.

I am not trying to start a flame war here at all. But could somebody be so kind as to sum up S Foote's arguments and theories concisely and clearly? And then perhaps explain how they contrast with the predominant view?

Don't worry.

Your not the only one.

 

[docj077]

Stick with the big three. Their "theories" have no basis in medical science and no research to adequately prove their opinions.

 

[powersam]

not about whether its right or wrong, youngbaldie wants a rundown of it for his own personal interest and is going to get it. argue about it in a different thread.

 

[Armando Jose]

Hi youngbaldie:

I am Armando and my theory is based in the equality of all healthy scalp hairs. The main difference is that hairs on top of head are susceptible to problems with sebum flow, mainly elimination. This process don't ocurr with scalp hair side because these hairs are in physical contact with a absorbent surface as the pillow all nigths.

If you visit my web http://www.againstalopeciaandbaldness.com there is more information.

regards

Armando

 

[wookster]

It seems that the main difference between the Big 3 - proponents description of the balding process and the Stephen Foote description of male pattern baldness is that the conventional baldness science describes the problem as one of cell receptors, that is to say androgen receptors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptor_(biochemistry)

In biochemistry, a receptor is a protein on the cell membrane or within the cytoplasm or cell nucleus that binds to a specific molecule (a ligand), such as a neurotransmitter, hormone, or other substance, and initiates the cellular response to the ligand. Ligand-induced changes in the behavior of receptor proteins result in physiological changes that constitute the biological actions of the ligands.

The Foote theory takes a more practical engineering approach, if my interpretation is correct.

http://www.hairsite2.com/library/abst-167.htm

There is a natural 'Hydraulic' hair growth adjustment mechanism, that can be observed in human hair growth patterns. Given Accepted knowledge, this offers an important insight into mammalian evolution, human physiology, and female suseptibility to immune system dysfunction.

 

[Bryan]

It seems that the main difference between the Big 3 - proponents description of the balding process and the Stephen Foote description of male pattern baldness is that the conventional baldness science describes the problem as one of cell receptors, that is to say androgen receptors...

Oh horseshit, Wookster! It has nothing to do with androgen receptors, except very very indirectly. Can't you think of a more sophisticated way to explain it than just that??

 

[wookster]

It seems that the main difference between the Big 3 - proponents description of the balding process and the Stephen Foote description of male pattern baldness is that the conventional baldness science describes the problem as one of cell receptors, that is to say androgen receptors...

Oh horseshit, Wookster! It has nothing to do with androgen receptors, except very very indirectly. Can't you think of a more sophisticated way to explain it than just that??

:freaked: :freaked: :freaked:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_antagonist

An antiandrogen, or androgen antagonist, is any of a group of hormone receptor antagonist compounds that are capable of preventing or inhibiting the biologic effects of androgens, male sex hormones, on normally responsive tissues in the body (see androgen insensitivity syndrome). Antiandrogens usually work by blocking the appropriate receptors, competing for binding sites on the cell's surface, obstructing the androgens' pathway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_i ... y_syndrome

The androgen receptor (AR) is a large protein of at least 910 amino acids. Each molecule consists of a portion which binds the androgen, a zinc finger portion that binds to DNA in steroid sensitive areas of nuclear chromatin, and an area that controls transcription.

Testosterone diffuses from the circulation into the cytoplasm of a target cell. Some is metabolized to estradiol, some reduced to DHT, and some remains as testosterone (T). Both T and DHT can bind and activate the androgen receptor, though DHT does so with more potent and prolonged effect. As DHT (or T) binds to the receptor, a portion of the protein is cleaved. The AR-DHT combination dimerizes by combining with a second AR-DHT, both are phosphorylated, and the entire complex moves into the cell nucleus and binds to androgen response elements on the promoter region of androgen-sensitive target genes. The transcription effect is amplified or inhibited by coactivators or corepressors.

 

[Bryan]

Keep working on it, Wookster.

Hint: try explaining what androgens have to do with balding...

 

[michael barry]

Youngbaldie,'


I'll try and explain Foote's idea in a paragraph in regular language:

The lymphatics that drain lymph fluid from your bodies extremeties get backed up on your scalp because of higher blood feed in some people's scalps underneath them. Lymphatic vessels have one way "pumps" on them that pump away, moving lymph to tissues that need it, and draining it away constantly. But Stephen thinks that up on your scalp, too much fluid accumulates and is having a hard time draining "back down" into the body due to insufficient drain "plumbing" in the human cranium in many cases due to the relatively few lymph drainage vessels we have up there. As drainiage is very good from the face, neck and upper chest, he feels the vessels in this area below the scalp get "backed up". Its kind of like your bathtub getting clogged with hair, and when you drain it...........it drains too slowly. This "too slow" drain in the face, neck, and upper chest.................leads to too much fluid stuck up there in the scalp in the male pattern baldness areas. Stephen feels that a mild edema takes place and that fluid pressure here gets slightly heightened, but not enough as what happens in clinical edema that happens on a womans arm or legs (also kills hair in many cases there), but just subtlely. When your hair then goes into a resting phase, and the dermal papilla shrinks and migrates upward near the surface of the dermis, pressure underneath it can really get higher. When a new anagen phase is about to happen, the dermal papilla dives down in the dermis but finds it cannot widen like normally due to pressure from the cells around it now because their is pressure against it. This is called contact inhibition and all normal cells exhibit this. Cancer cells do not have contact inhibition and its why they will grow wildly all over the place and invade organs, etc. The dermal papilla, running into enough pressure that its own cells tell themselves "stop, your growing into another organ" only produce vellus-type hairs. As years go on in this process, the stagnant lymph fluid (like stagnant water in a pond) has microbials and other ugly things living in it, and it invites a response from your immune system that tries to kill some of that stuff. In the course of this, oxides and killer cells from the immune system really damage and age the scalp, leading to that old man's scalp "look" and hair cells become irreversably damaged and undergo cellular death. Stephen conteds the lymphatic pumps are androgenically stimulated by DHT and this is why the go too fast in some men, pumping too hard and causing great drainiage from the face (leading to thick beards, alot of neck hair, hairy chests), but that same great drainige down low, backs up the few available "drain pipes" in the upper floors of the building near the penthouse (your scalp).


Thats a pretty short description of what Stephen thinks is happening.








What I think is happening is that you have more androgen receptors in your head hair than a non-bald guy does, and your make more DHT in your outer root sheath in all probability than what he does. Its been noted that balding scalp has about 3 to 3.5 times as much DHT present than non-balding scalp (Sawaya) and that more androgen receptor expression is noted. So, if your head hair has (this is just an example) 100 androgen receptors on a dermal papilla to another guy's 50 androgen receptors...............................and your alpha five reductase enzymes (maybe you have more of them also) in your outer root sheath of each and every hair follicle on your body makes MORE DHT than the other guy does (3 times as much in balding scalp, remember?), you have 50 extra androgen receptors and perhaps twice as much DHT hanging around right?

While the non-bald guy's hair might have 30 DHT molecules with his 50 receptor sites, you have 60 DHT molecules binded with your 100 receptor sites. Youre getting twice as much androgenic stimulation in your hair than he is. This is more than your head hair can handle, and it begins to grow more weakly......................and all the downstream stuff in male pattern baldness begins to happen. The dermal papilla cells make more growth inhibitiors and less growth factors, a possible inflammation occurs in response to too much TGF-beta expression (a dermal papilla growth inhibitior) around the follicle, etc. Thats kinda what I think is happening in a nutshell.


I can show you a few pictures of women who are going male pattern bald when they become transexuals and take testosterone injects to be like men. They go bald just like men do and grow beard and chest hair just like men do rather quickly (about a year to a year and a half). They go bald in the male pattern fashion. The simply get enough testosterone so that thier alpha five reductase enzymes located in their outer root sheaths of each and every hair follicle on their body, can convert the testosterone to DHT and bind with their androgen receptors. They then can go bald just like their dads and brothers did. I think we are going to find, just like Docj077 has said, that men who go male pattern baldness primarily have too many androgen receptors on their hair follicles. In fact, they arlready have found that to an extent. A german study showed that 98.6 % of balding men had the same variant of the androgen receptor gene, while only 76% of men who weren't balding had this gene. This was a large study with over a thousand men. Your head hair needs no androgen (male) hormones at all to grow. People with androgen insensitivity syndrome (androgen receptors dont work due to malfunction), have beautiful hair like a womans all of their lives.

 

[youngbaldie]

Wow! Thanks for that excellent response Michael.

I think I have a better understanding of these ideas than I did before. But with Stephen's theory, this has me intrigued. How do 5 AR inhibitors fit into this? What treatments or future treatments does he propose if it is a fluid problem mainly?

I mean, is the solution more with scalp healing like copper peptides? Or does he believe that anti-androgens are still a necessary part of the fight?

 

[michael barry]

Youngbaldie,

Here are pictures of female twins. One takes testosterone because she wants to be like a man, the other does not:

http://www2.oprah.com/tows/slide/200509 ... _109.jhtml

See how the one on the right is going bald, and has a beard.
Look closer here:http://www2.oprah.com/tows/slide/200509/20050916/slide_20050916_107.jhtml
Thats a girl man...........................taking testosterone.
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl= ... n%26sa%3DN




I mean, hell.........................it doesn't get anymore clear than that. Armando will tell you that cutting her hair short is why she went bald. But if that were the case, she'd have went bald before the T injects right?



I can link you a picture to a female "p**rn star" who takes testosterone named Van Diesel. She is disgusting to me, but she has breasts with hair all over them, a thicker beard than any guy you probably know with a mutton-chop mustache, hairy legs, hairy belly, hairy arms..................and is going male pattern bald. She has not had sex-change surgery and still has a vagina. Its like a biker-dude with a vagina. Its just a woman shot up with testosterone who now looks about like what she would have if she were born a boy instead of a girl.





Here are two more female TWINS pictured:
http://www2.oprah.com/tows/slide/200509 ... _102.jhtml
This time the one who takes testosterone didn't go bald, but look at how her hair is "older looking" and somewhat thinned vs. her sister's. Take a closer look at her here, http://www2.oprah.com/tows/slide/200509 ... _103.jhtml
Note the ageing of the face and neck especially, and the frontal thinning seen vs. her sister's hair. The grey, the beard hair...................she's still a female with a vagina, but looks like a man now. Its just testsoterone shots (or even a testosterone cream).



I dont think that sebum back up causes baldness, because hair transplants last a lifetime.................and Ive shown pictures of men who wear their hair short post transplant for decades and still have it. Finasteride has no effect on sebum output from the sebaceous glands, but subjects have 277 more hairs per square inch on it than men recieving placebo over a five year period, so we know its effective. Ive also seen many many many men who buzz their hair for a long time and have no recession at all. I dont think sebum back up causes baldness in men The reason that the wreath hair is the last to go (wreath hair does thin by the way, but not go completely bald..........if you look at really older men) is that wreath hair does not have as many androgen receptors and the T/DHT ratio in the wreath hair is different (more T, much less DHT) than in frontal balding hair..................indicating much less alpha five reductase activity in the outer root sheath of these follicles, where alpha five resides.



I believe in pretty much the accepted standard theory of baldness. I think some men's hair is more resiliant in the face of male hormone, but for the most part balding men have more androgen receptor expression in their scalps and have more DHT made in the hairs of their scalp than men who keep their hair. Serum DHT in balding and non-balding men can be the same, and DHT "out in the body" is usually bound in an unusable form by globulin anyway (all but about 1% of it), so almost all DHT that kills hair is made right there at the follicle site in the hair's root sheath. I think very little prostate DHT makes it up to the scalp unaffected or unbound.




Here is a picture of a once pretty woman,
http://ringmybell.tv/BuckBefore.jpg
..............................who is now a bald headed man after testosterone injects,

 

[youngbaldie]

Hi youngbaldie:

I am Armando and my theory is based in the equality of all healthy scalp hairs. The main difference is that hairs on top of head are susceptible to problems with sebum flow, mainly elimination. This process don't ocurr with scalp hair side because these hairs are in physical contact with a absorbent surface as the pillow all nigths.

If you visit my web http://www.againstalopeciaandbaldness.com there is more information.

regards

Armando

Hey, thanks for that link. I agree that sebum is probably a big contributer to scalp problems including hair loss. But wouldn't it actually be more effective to keep the hair short and to use say Nizoral or T-gel to fight seborrhoeic dermatitis by allowing for maximum absoption of these shampoos? To me it seems if you kept the hair long as you suggest, perhaps the pillow might help with the hair shaft possibly to some extent, but it just seems to me that with longer hair, there is a tendency to really collect extra sebum. With longer hair, its hard to get great absorption from good shampoos that can cleanse the scalp (and also have anti-androgen properties). But if you keep your hair no more than 1 or 2 inches long, I would guess that these shampoos really soak up nicely in the scalp.

What do you think about this?

 

[michael barry]

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl= ... n%26sa%3DN


That is a picture of Buck Angel after testosterone. She is bald now, stil has a vagina, shaves her new chest hair, had to cut her breasts off surgically, has a mustache. Pretty icky if you ask me...................but you do see what testosterone can do to a pretty girl.


Men have roughly ten times the testosterone than women have. Women can only make testosterone in their adrenal gland (we can too----and do).





DHT inhibitors, according to Stephen, help by lessening androgenic stimulation in the lymphatic pumps in the face and neck and upper chest...................lessening the drainage there, and allowing more drainage from the scalp. Its like a tall building when everybody drains their bathtub at once into one drainpipe located in the center of the building running down through the basement and into the sewage system. The bathtubs on the top floors will drain slowly due to waiting for all the bathtubs in the lower floors draining underneath them.....................thats about what Stephen believes. Stephen also believes anti-inflammatories like copper peptides help by aiding lyph drainage and soothing inflammation which is present in edema most of the time and the anti-oxidant activity that fights against oxides in the ski which damage cells.

 

[youngbaldie]

I mean, hell.........................it doesn't get anymore clear than that. Armando will tell you that cutting her hair short is why she went bald. But if that were the case, she'd have went bald before the T injects right?

Yes, interesting.

These alternative theories sound tempting, but the problem I also have with them is that its no coincidence that male pattern baldness rarely if ever starts before puberty which is the time when sensitity to androgens seems to take off.

Boys typically always keep their relatively hair short in our society, yet never go bald until usually after the teen years.

And of course grown men that are not genetically sensitive to androgens can always shave their heads their entire lives and yet never go bald.

From my understanding, excessive sebum may aggravate male pattern baldness, but I don't believe it to be the cause. I think treating it is a major plus though. I mean, Merck used T-Gel along with Propecia in the trials, maybe that has something to do with their high success rate? Or am I off base here?

 

[michael barry]

On sebum and hair.........................


Men born without the alpha five reuductase type 2 enzyme (in Guatamala Merk studied these men when formulating finasteride), it has been found that these men make normal amounts of sebum, just like balding men have.


Thus I conclude that sebum makes no difference in baldness, but alpha five reductase makes a major difference in baldness. The only way that sebum might be very detrimental is if you dont wash your hair hardly at all and some of it gets reabsorbed back into the scalp, and it causes alot of ugly microbials to live in it on your scalp. Washing your hair every day is something that Dr. Edmund Griffin, a hair transplant surgeon, recommends to rid your scalp of sebum everyday for just this reason.

 

[youngbaldie]

On sebum and hair.........................


Men born without the alpha five reuductase type 2 enzyme (in Guatamala Merk studied these men when formulating finasteride), it has been found that these men make normal amounts of sebum, just like balding men have.

Ah, I forgot about that. Well, that pretty much sums it up right there.

 

[michael barry]

Youngbaldie wrote:

From my understanding, excessive sebum may aggravate male pattern baldness, but I don't believe it to be the cause. I think treating it is a major plus though. I mean, Merck used T-Gel along with Propecia in the trials, maybe that has something to do with their high success rate? Or am I off base here?

If the T-gel was the kind that had piroctone olamine, it would definitely help. Piroctone olamine shampoos were tested and shown to be about as beneficial for hair as ketoconazole (Nizoral) shampoos were. Both reduced sebum and both are anti-microbial. T-gel, despite the strong odor, is generally regarded as unharmful for hair and quite good for dandruff. Tough smell on that stuff though.