Why does baldness start at certain age ?
- Thread starter Xander94
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Responsibility.
JK.
'Prevalence and extent of atherosclerosis in adolescents and young adults: implications for prevention from the Pathobiological Determinants of Atherosclerosis in Youth Study
[...]
Conclusions: Atherosclerosis begins in youth. Fatty streaks and clinically significant raised lesions increase rapidly in prevalence and extent during the 15- to 34-year age span.'
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
'The researchers found that young men with coronary artery disease had a higher prevalence of premature greying (50% versus 30%) and male-pattern baldness (49% versus 27%) compared to healthy controls. After adjusting for age and other cardiovascular risk factors, male-pattern baldness was associated with a 5.6 times greater risk of coronary artery disease (95% confidence interval [CI] 4.0-7.8, p<0.0001) [...].'
JK.
'Prevalence and extent of atherosclerosis in adolescents and young adults: implications for prevention from the Pathobiological Determinants of Atherosclerosis in Youth Study
[...]
Conclusions: Atherosclerosis begins in youth. Fatty streaks and clinically significant raised lesions increase rapidly in prevalence and extent during the 15- to 34-year age span.'
Prevalence and extent of atherosclerosis in adolescents and young adults: implications for prevention from the Pathobiological Determinants of Atherosclerosis in Youth Study - PubMed
Atherosclerosis begins in youth. Fatty streaks and clinically significant raised lesions increase rapidly in prevalence and extent during the 15- to 34-year age span. Primary prevention of atherosclerosis, as contrasted with primary prevention of clinically manifest atherosclerotic disease, must...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
'The researchers found that young men with coronary artery disease had a higher prevalence of premature greying (50% versus 30%) and male-pattern baldness (49% versus 27%) compared to healthy controls. After adjusting for age and other cardiovascular risk factors, male-pattern baldness was associated with a 5.6 times greater risk of coronary artery disease (95% confidence interval [CI] 4.0-7.8, p<0.0001) [...].'
Male-pattern baldness and premature graying associated with risk of early heart disease
Male-pattern baldness and premature greying are associated with a more than fivefold risk of heart disease before the age of 40 years, according to new research. Obesity was associated with a fourfold risk of early heart disease.
www.sciencedaily.com
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These discussions always cause squabbling because the androgen damage is different from the visible hair loss.
The androgen damage starts accumulating at puberty. It just doesn't show for years to come. The visible effect begins to snowball as the damage accumulates.
The transplant industry will tell you that thinning is not really noticeable for the first 1/3rd of the density. The youngest guys to "start losing their hair" (translation: to NOTICE that they are losing hair) are in their late teens or early 20s. Not early teens. The damage has already been accumulating for years by then.
The androgen damage starts accumulating at puberty. It just doesn't show for years to come. The visible effect begins to snowball as the damage accumulates.
The transplant industry will tell you that thinning is not really noticeable for the first 1/3rd of the density. The youngest guys to "start losing their hair" (translation: to NOTICE that they are losing hair) are in their late teens or early 20s. Not early teens. The damage has already been accumulating for years by then.
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How do you explain sudden onset of shedding then? Like some people start shedding 200+ noticeable hairs a day and they go up a norwood in 6-12 months.
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cuz you touch yourself at night
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wait until 2040 and we will know the answer
At 40 a lot more of that exogenous T is liable to be getting converted to DHT & E. The body changes between those ages in general. Endo, immune, etc. 18yo is basically late puberty. Androgen exposure is just one of the factors that adds up to hair loss.
I don't recall any research proving that exogenous T supplied at 40yo will rapidly bring an enuch's loss up to where it would have been if he had spent his life with normal androgen levels. (It's obviously not a very easy thing to test.) Do the 40yo enuchs receiving exogenous T rapidly catch all the way up (to where their baldness would be with a lifetime of normal T), or just partway? As for the 18yo guys getting exogenous T, are they really not balding at all, or is the process just set back a number of years (and not showing yet)? AFAIK this stuff isn't really settled. But it's been many years since I read into all of it.
I agree about the genetic clock being a factor.
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What starts puberty at certain age? Genetic clock! Hairloss is genetically determined at which age it starts .some people could be perfectly fine at 30 and complete bald at 40.genes that cause baldness activates after certain age which is different for everyone.
Hair can be 30-40% miniaturized and still look fine. If the guy doesn't wear it very long then it might take 50% before it shows.
Show me a 40yo bald guy who "looked fine at 30". I will probably show you a guy who was miniaturizing at 30. It just wasn't quite detectable yet. It's a long process.
Can hair loss have abrupt periods of speeding up? Yes.
Do some guys lose hair in different age patterns than others? Yes. Of course. People are individuals.
Some guys have abrupt growth spurts during puberty. Others just get taller gradually. Some guys end up getting very tall, others don't. There are all those variations, but we still agree with the GENERAL notion that "the rush of hormones causes boys to get taller during puberty."
And GENERALLY speaking, male hair follicles start to be affected by androgens at puberty. Facial & body hair react positively to it. Scalp hair reacts negatively to it. The effects start to accumulate. When a certain amount is reached then miniaturization starts to happen to scalp hairs. That is the snowball of hair loss starting to roll.
The reason why we lust after "teenage hair" is because for most guys it's never that thick again. Even most of the guys who stay Norwood#1-2 as adults. They may not have visible hair loss but the androgen exposure is still thinning their hair in a milder way.
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Very well said.
lol
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Could be genetic and I mean actually at the genetic level such as telomeres and sh*t, but otherwise?
My new hypothesis it relates to the effects of growth hormone, IGF-1 and insulin on the body as much as anything.
If you will look at the faces of people as they get older, their faces often get more broad, and in some cases, if you look at for example David Bowie, when he was young, his upper jaw/maxilla was actually quite flat, and as he got older his maxilla expanded out, this is quite easily explained by the advanced effects of growth promoting hormones on the body.
Here's the thing, in my specific case, I know now for a fact that my insulin levels and IGF-1 and possibly DHEA are higher than they were when I was young, and I am now strongly suspecting when I recovered from a significant hair loss event in my late 20s, that my estrogen (which promotes hair growth) and my IGF-1 and insulin were lower.
It's a balancing act, and as we get older it seems at different times and progressions that balance gets disrupted.
As for myself now, I have documented proof that my estrogen is less than it was and that I am aromatizing less estrogen than I was when I was in my late 20s, and my base testosterone (not even DHT) is much higher. I have absolutely no idea why I'm not converting more testosterone to estrogen even when I take DHT blockers, it's a f*****g mystery, but it can be corrected with exogenous hormones or medications which reduce or block the effects of others.
Anyhow, that's my take, don't buy into the boomer myth that things just mysteriously happen, when people say "genetics" they might as well say they don't know, because that's about as close to a non-answer as any person can get. IMO personally, it has way more to do with hormone balance than anything else.
I also found out personally that high stress and anger levels sustained for long periods can induce adrenal activity, and I myself have had significant issues with both of these for a while now because life is just retarded as of late for me. But for me especially, because my body does not produce or release very much cortisol (I have addison's disease), instead my body is probably just releasing a fuckton of DHEA.
So whenever you go super saiyan and rage out, realize your body could be producing more adrenal hormones, of which may not be beneficial to your hair. It's not merely the emotional strain of stress but the signalling to your adrenals that precipitates a negative hormone cascade.
Anyhow, just some info to consider.
My new hypothesis it relates to the effects of growth hormone, IGF-1 and insulin on the body as much as anything.
If you will look at the faces of people as they get older, their faces often get more broad, and in some cases, if you look at for example David Bowie, when he was young, his upper jaw/maxilla was actually quite flat, and as he got older his maxilla expanded out, this is quite easily explained by the advanced effects of growth promoting hormones on the body.
Here's the thing, in my specific case, I know now for a fact that my insulin levels and IGF-1 and possibly DHEA are higher than they were when I was young, and I am now strongly suspecting when I recovered from a significant hair loss event in my late 20s, that my estrogen (which promotes hair growth) and my IGF-1 and insulin were lower.
It's a balancing act, and as we get older it seems at different times and progressions that balance gets disrupted.
As for myself now, I have documented proof that my estrogen is less than it was and that I am aromatizing less estrogen than I was when I was in my late 20s, and my base testosterone (not even DHT) is much higher. I have absolutely no idea why I'm not converting more testosterone to estrogen even when I take DHT blockers, it's a f*****g mystery, but it can be corrected with exogenous hormones or medications which reduce or block the effects of others.
Anyhow, that's my take, don't buy into the boomer myth that things just mysteriously happen, when people say "genetics" they might as well say they don't know, because that's about as close to a non-answer as any person can get. IMO personally, it has way more to do with hormone balance than anything else.
I also found out personally that high stress and anger levels sustained for long periods can induce adrenal activity, and I myself have had significant issues with both of these for a while now because life is just retarded as of late for me. But for me especially, because my body does not produce or release very much cortisol (I have addison's disease), instead my body is probably just releasing a fuckton of DHEA.
So whenever you go super saiyan and rage out, realize your body could be producing more adrenal hormones, of which may not be beneficial to your hair. It's not merely the emotional strain of stress but the signalling to your adrenals that precipitates a negative hormone cascade.
Anyhow, just some info to consider.
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Receptor sensitivity is a myth, if anything it's because their bodies are already burdened by other hormones increasing in the absence of testosterone. Basically, the body as it gets older has to manage the burden of other potentially increasing hormones and adding one more antagonistic hormone to the mix aggravates their bodies enough to push things over the edge.
DHEA, insulin, and IGF-1 and even too much cortisol can all impose negative outcomes on hair. Using myself as an example, I absolutely believe that certain hormones can increase over time, especially if you have a problem such as insulin resistance, but even overactive pituitary or adrenal hormone release.
The hair loss community is overly fixated on testosterone, and that is one diffraction of a whole spectrum of issues that are implicated in hair problems.
I was also losing hair in my mid-teens too. My hair had some changes in color/texture as early as 13 when puberty hit. (I love it when Finasteride cheerleaders on the baldness forums say "You should have gotten on finasteride as soon as you started noticing hair loss. You would be fine now.")
Puberty gives you a sudden massive dose of androgens. Bodybuilders taking steroids ain't got nothing on mother nature.
If you have severe baldness genes, and the hormones started hitting at 11-13, then it's not hard to imagine having visible loss at 15yo.
Good hair genes = even crazy hormone levels & bad lifestyle won't make you bald.
Bad hair genes = even the healthiest lifestyle will make you severely bald.
Hair genes matter.
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All of this can be reversed however, because estrogen is a potent growth factor for hair and skin, there are elderly women that have a thick full head of hair and I'm willing to bet you dollars to doughnuts that there are two things driving that.
- good cellular glucose intake/insulin sensitivity
- decent retention of estrogen levels
Estrogen can re-enlarge miniaturized hair follicles, it can cause growth where hair was previously thought to have been completely done for.
It's mostly about balance, I know in my case I was that guy who looked great at 30 and now I'm having problems, but the issue was not that I was miniaturizing as we speak, it's not some inevitable wall of spikes that is coming for you. It's because my hormone profile has shifted.
I am only finding out now from my endo the extent to which my hormones are out of whack and how much more estrogen I had back then which was clearly counteracting the loss and miniaturization of my hair. Because I went through an extreme hair loss event in my late 20s and given your somewhat grim prediction for androgen sensitive men, I should never have recovered but I literally did. I got my teenaged hair back, and I didn't understand exactly why that was when I was roughly age 30 when it fully did.
Now I know because I know what I'm lacking now, estrogen, and what I have an excess of also is too much insulin, IGF-1, bordering on too much prolactin and DHEA.
Fix your hormones and yes, mark my words even at 40 I will regrow my hair back to what it was when I was 30.
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You're using an outdated model it is
Androgen sensitive, vs androgen insensitive.
Most men who don't lose hair to androgens tend to be actually insensitive IN GENERAL including their skin - to the effects of androgens and it seems very common to me that those men age facially a lot worse than men who are sensitive to androgens.
Don't be such a f*****g doomer, there is already proof that with the right balance of hormones, it doesn't f*****g matter and that you can literally replicate conditions of your youth with the proper modulation of hormones.
"genes" is again a non-term that implies magic or some other force that is not understood which causally determines the fate of one's hair regardless of other factors which clearly matter and have a documented method of doing so.
I would say in at least 90% of cases, it's not "the body is being worn down the genetic clock is ticking and your androgen receptors are just ticking timebombs".
No, f*** that, it's hormone dysregulation, period, fix that, fix your hair.
So what about the more recent talk about how early age balding is may be correlated with other health problems like heart disease? That early balding is indicative of poor general health? Is there some merit to that or not at all?
As far as I know I am in great health. I haven't had in depth testing done but I may do it now just out of curiosity.
For me my balding is now a purely cosmetic aesthetic issue. I am horseshoe bald. I can't live with the horseshoe because it looks awful. And I also can't wear wigs because of future career. So I need to find a solution to get rid of the horseshoe ring. There's gotta be something I can do.
As far as I know I am in great health. I haven't had in depth testing done but I may do it now just out of curiosity.
For me my balding is now a purely cosmetic aesthetic issue. I am horseshoe bald. I can't live with the horseshoe because it looks awful. And I also can't wear wigs because of future career. So I need to find a solution to get rid of the horseshoe ring. There's gotta be something I can do.
I don't think early hair loss is indicative of health problems, it is just how sensitive follicles are to androgens, that is about it.