Youth Gone Bald: Hair Loss At 20 Years, Prostate Cancer Link?

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Main Category: Prostate / Prostate Cancer
Article Date: 16 Feb 2011 - 9:00 PDT


Not one young man actually "enjoys" experiencing a receding hairline, but now, there is a link between who start to lose hair at the age of 20 and the likelihood of developing prostate cancer. Early screening is always recommended, but in particular now for youth gone bald. Until now there has been conflicting evidence about the link between balding and prostate cancer; this is the first study to suggest a link between going bald at the young age of 20 and the development of prostate cancer in later life.

Professor Philippe Giraud M.D., PhD, Professor of Radiation Oncology at the Paris Descartes University and at the European Georges Pompidou Hospital, both in Paris states:

"At present there is no hard evidence to show any benefit from screening the general population for prostate cancer. We need a way of identifying those men who are at high risk of developing the disease and who could be targeted for screening and also considered for chemo-prevention using anti-androgenic drugs such as finasteride. Balding at the age of 20 may be one of these easily identifiable risk factors and more work needs to be done now to confirm this."

Male pattern is characterized by hair receding from the lateral sides of the forehead, known as a "receding hairline". Receding hairlines are usually seen in males above the ages of 20 but can be seen as early as late teens as well.

An additional bald patch may develop on top, or the vertex. The trigger for this type of baldness called androgenetic alopecia is DHT, a powerful sex hormone, body, and facial hair growth promoter that can adversely affect the prostate as well as the hair located on the head.

The mechanism by which DHT accomplishes this is not yet fully understood. In genetically-prone scalps, DHT initiates a process of follicular miniaturization. Through the process of follicular miniaturization, hair shaft width is progressively decreased until scalp hair resembles fragile vellus hair or "peach fuzz" or else becomes non-existent. Onset of hair loss sometimes begins as early as end of puberty, and is mostly genetically determined.

The French study compared 388 men being treated for prostate cancer with a control group of 281 healthy men and found that those with the disease were twice as likely as the healthy men to have started going bald when they were 20.

However, if the men only started to lose their hair when they were 30 or 40, there was no difference in their risk of developing prostate cancer compared to the control group. The study found no association between early hair loss and an earlier diagnosis of prostate cancer, and nor was there any link between the pattern of hair loss and the development of cancer.

Dr. Michael Yassa (M.D.), currently Assistant Professor at the University of Montreal (Montreal, Canada) and a radiation oncologist at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital in Montreal, but who previously worked as a radiation oncology Fellow at the European Georges Pompidou Hospital, continued:

"There were only three men with stage III and none with stage IV hair loss at the age of 20, but the data revealed that any balding at stages II-IV (37 cases and 14 controls) was associated with double the risk of prostate cancer later in life. This trend was lost at ages 30 and 40. We were unable to find an association between the type or pattern of hair loss and the development of cancer. This might be due to the very low prevalence of stage III and IV hair loss at the ages of 20 and 30 in our study."

The researchers say the link between baldness and the development of prostate cancer is still unclear.

Full Report: Annals of Oncology

Written by Sy Kraft, B.A.
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today

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