Scientists have finally found the potential “cure” for baldness | Hacker News Reader

Scientists have finally found the potential “cure” for baldness

independent.co.uk

101 pointsmdp2021190 comments

I think we'll have sustainable cold fusion before we find the cure to baldness. As a bald man I can say this: I'd much rather every second of thought, ever penny of funding be directed towards say, solving climate change, better public transportation, defeating viral disease or eliminating cancer. Being bald has not stopped me from being happy, finding a partner or enjoying life to the fullest.

Solving balding will open the door to solving many genetic problems, deepening our understanding of our cells, hormones, etc.

Wasn't aware that baldness was a problem.

Whatever it is, problem or not, it's a huge market.

It effects like 2/3s of men by age 35 and about 1/2 of women by age 55.

Bald man here: I got clued in when I accidentally started A/B testing with a baseball cap.

It was strange, every so often I would have a day where people were noticeably warmer on average. They would laugh at my jokes, they would help carry a conversation, they would let me have the stage in a group discussion without pushing in -- it was amazing. This only happened every so often, and I chalked it up to luck and chance and some days just being better than others. On one of these good days, I was busy regaling my enraptured audience with a tale about a covey of quail we were raising when I got an itch on my head. I lifted my hat to scratch and a wave of revulsion washed over people's faces. Instantly, they lost interest, glanced away, and looked generally uncomfortable. Someone even coughed. I stumbled but kept going, however it was clear that the story was now unwelcome so I abortively wrapped it up. I made a few attempts to restart conversation but got the "good day" responses were gone, I got only the typical lukewarm responses. I went to the restroom to look for something on my head that might have caused the reaction, but it took me some time staring in the mirror and searching until I found the culprit.

Peoples' enthusiasm didn't return until the next day, when I ran the test again, this time intentionally, but with the same result. It was reproducible. "Good days" happened when I covered my thinning hairline. To be clear, these people included both men and women and they had known me for years. On a conscious level, they knew exactly what I looked like and that I was balding. On a subconscious level, though, they treated me very differently depending on whether or not they had recently seen my hairline at its worst. Once I started paying attention, I realized that this behavior was universal, and a bit of introspection revealed that the exact same instincts were active in my own mind.

Appearances matter! Incidentally, I've found that women tend to be much more understanding as they often have had similar A/B experiences with makeup, while men will often just chalk my observations up to confidence, reversing cause and effect.

Maybe it isn't the hair, but the hat? Have you tried with a wig?

People saw the ugly underside of the baseball cap bill and flipped? Kindly understand that you have probably put at most 1/1000th the thought into this that I have, and that I have 15 more years of first hand corroborating evidence to follow it up with. Even a number of informal RCTs! If you don't trust me, that's certainly your right -- I'll just ask you to keep an open mind, point you in the direction of the "bad hair = bad person" Hollywood trope, and let you go on your way.

Wigs boost me into a tier of attractiveness far beyond what I was able to achieve with a hat coverup and, later, with shaving. On one hand wigs yield far better results than people realize, but on the other they demand upkeep, disclosure, and the social stigma is severe if you "get caught." I don't use them because hair systems (wig + glue -- the good ones) get nasty quickly from my workout routine, so I prefer to just go shaved. When you start losing hair, all of your compensating options have steep tradeoffs.

I find your comments distinctly funny. Perhaps it is your hat/wig day ?

on the internet, everyone is wearing a hat/wig

Hah, wigs make me so damn attractive that women initiate conversations. Feel the power!

There's a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Jeff gets his head shaved by accident due to something Larry said to a doctor who was about to work on Jeff.

From then on Jeff experiences loss of a client, being ignored by wait staff, and is made to experience the status Larry tried to tell him about.

I think there are a lot of physical things that people judge us over: body type, height, weird quirks like an eye problem or a big mole. Attractiveness of the face is very important in how we're treated.

I feel like we'll hyper focus on whatever our weakness is compared to the norm, and it turns into the center of the world for us. The most important is the attitude and vibe you put on. There are inspirational figures in government, industry and entertainment that buck the trend and use whatever personality traits to overcome the physical. I can point to any number of ugly people who are treated as if they weren't.

I thought of that episode constantly for the ≈2 weeks I wore a mustache. Never before had I gotten more approving nods and general warmth from other, usually older, men with mustaches. It was quite entertaining to observe.

Do some intensive body sculpt: you'll be walking in a different world (of different reactions).

As a 42 year old man who has been bald for 20 years, I have never experienced anything like that. is this satire?

So would solving cancer, so why start at baldness ?

Sure, why not run a marathon instead of taking a first step? There are thousands of steps in a marathon, it's literally thousands of times better, so why not do it instead?

There's only one scientist in the world and we have to collectively decide what she focuses on... Is that how it works?

I prefer to think of the scientists working on solving balding as Larry David or George Constanza-types. Bitter about their hair loss, kept going by the promise of a better life in the future through hair.

There's a baldness research team at the institute I work at. The head of the lab looks like a talk show host from the 1980s, and his work is derided by other labs. But he brings in more external funding than any other group, I don't think of him as a lonely crusader.

True, we could also prolong erections...

Because we as a species can multi-task. Many billions of dollars are spent on cancer research every year by the NIH alone. Imagine if we did all our research as a species in series as opposed to in parallel.

Because we don't know how we will discover new things.

Because demand for popular things can drive research into important things.

Because there's no reason not to.

>I think we'll have sustainable cold fusion before

I'm pretty sure that the Sun will destroy the Earth before we get cold fusion, because the latter is literally impossible.

>be directed towards say, solving

Basic science is a thing. Hair is part of skin, and understanding how hair works is part of understanding how skin works. Both existing treatments for baldness (finasteride and minoxidil) were originally treatments for other conditions repurposed for hair loss. Bald men face a higher risk of skin cancer as well, which is hardly trivial:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.30395

>Being bald has not stopped me

So the funny thing about the baldness discussion is that we always talk about treating male-pattern baldness as a thing that primarily affects men's experience of life. But, in practice, women often choose to date men with hair in preference to men who are bald. By revealed preferences, we infer that women experience some kind of perceptual pleasure related to having a partner with hair. This is very rarely considered a meaningful endpoint.

This perpetuates the fallacy that all "scientific effort" is in some way fungible, and if you took scientists off one project, you could just put them on another one without any friction or loss of effectiveness.

That makes about as much sense as suggesting you could take me, a PHP developer, off the project I'm on now, throw me onto a team developing embedded OSes for medical devices, and have me just pick right up and be fully productive on day 1.

It also presupposes that as long as there is even one important hard problem out there, we should simply ignore all the less-important problems and throw all our resources at the most important one, which is also both unrealistic and fairly unhelpful.

Nah, it's just saying there might be more important fish to fry that fixing my broken mop.

Nah, you just don't get the point. There are trillions of people millions at least of which are solving civilizations problems right now. This idea that you can simply take a person with very specific knowledge off a problem set at resign them to another is ridiculous. There wouldn't even be a benefit given that most problems are solved by experts that have dedicated their life to a problem. Adding new people from other disciplines or projects - they would spend their time most likely covering already covered ground. There are enough people in the world to work on more than the dozen problems or so you can list of in your head.

If we had "trillions of people" living on earth we'd have a whole new set of problems, all of which would be much more urgent and important than solving the mystery of why my hair abandoned me at age 28.

i think those things are not really comparable in terms of funding/difficulties to solve. there are so many positive outcomes that can come from this research, like regenerative cures.

and this would also help women who suffer from alopecia, it must be much worse for them as they can't use anti-androgens like propecia for men.

As someone who is not bald, I actually kinda want to be, simply because I find hair to be an unnecessary chore.

$20 Norelco trimmer and you can join the club any day of the week, my man.

The only thing I hated about losing hair was the transition period where you're uncertain about whether it's really happening, at what rate, and what to do about it; but, once that decision is made - it's nothing but relief and I'm at peace with the size-1 permastubble. As a bonus, one tiny frown and no one talks to you, so that's an unexpected benefit.

Even if a 'cure' comes out, I wouldn't touch it because vanity is a young man's game. But if we gain some deeper medical or biological understanding from this, all the better.

Just use your favorite discount razor that comes in the mail via subscription

Shaving the head isn't actually that much work, ~5 min per day (if you do it daily). Feels a lot less strenuous than trimming every week or two, even though it's probably a bit more time spent overall.

You would still have to cut hair because balding is usually in spot patterns, not all over at once

Listen baldy, I deeply respect your good intent, but you see the world does not reward men who can solve the worlds real problems. Solve a cosmetic problem and you will be way richer AND happier. Heck even some kind of permanent wig inventor will be richer than a cure for cancer.

Agreed. Baldness is not even remotely a serious problem, if it's a problem at all. However, it's interesting because:

- It seems easy compared to other medical problems

- There's a ton of money on the line for whoever solves it

- It still hasn't been solved

These things together don't inspire a lot of confidence in people who say we are close to curing aging, cancer, mental illness, chronic pain, etc. It almost feels like we are living before the dawn of medical science.

We have enough people, money, and resources to do all these things all at once.

I always figured we'd have antigravity before we discovered a weight-loss drug that actually works without any debilitating side effects, but here we are, science found the GLP-1 pathway in their efforts to discover a new diabetes therapy and suddenly real, no BS weight loss drugs are a thing that exists, with many competitors popping up in only two years. We're already at the second-generation of these drugs!

Point is that progress always seems hopelessly stalled for what feels like forever and then one day the clouds open up, and the sun shines through. That's how it goes.

All specific anxieties about baldness aside, it would be cool if human beings were able to so radically re-engineer their appearance in such a striking way with a single chemical target / treatment that we could go from a species where the males get a chrome dome in their mid-life, as it has been for hundreds of thousands of years (presumably), to a species where males (and females) have thick locks long into their twilight years.

All those funny portraits of history with balding VIPs would become anachronisms, divided from the hirsute future by a follicle singularity.

> All those funny portraits of history with balding VIPs would become anachronisms,

This is already the case in movies and television. Before 2000, extremely common to see a bald/balding character appear on TV. Today though, they are rare.

Hmm. Wonder what that's about?

I don't buy it. Dwayne Johnson one the highest-grossing and highest-paid actors of the 10s is bald. Along him you have a host of action actors that are bald. Top tv shows like Lost and Breaking Bad featured bald main characters. Just to name a few.

Yeah. The biggest difference I've noticed between our era and those in the recent past is that balding men now just shave their head instead of living with a bald spot. Big improvement IMO.

Or, more accurately, those with mild balding go ahead and get it fixed. Leaving those with the power donut the choice between Jason Alexander or Patrick Stewart.

Dwayne Johnson was bald by the time he started acting, probably due to steroid use.

Fixing it and shaving it have both exploded in popularity at the expense of the power donut, the combover, and the toupee.

I wonder how Jeff Bezos is doing these days.

Or that in the current era we have elevated appearance way above where it should be, instead of judging people by what they say and do.

Radio, television, and finally internet and smartphones made things progressively worse in this regard.

People have always judged based on appearance. This is apparent when reading classic literature. Long-winded descriptions of individuals and various assumptions one could draw from these observations are very common.

Like the joke goes, acting in Fast&Furious will make you bald...

No, the poster has a point. Think of Robert Duvall. Very different profile.

It's not the baldness that's raking in the money--obviously, it's the physique. So much so that it even nullifies the lack of hair.

Is there any male protagonist without crazy abs nowadays? Now compare that with the bodies they show in older/classical movies. I wouldn't be surprised if, after the not-so-recent colorizing craze, they would also start a "retrofitting fitness" craze.

> divided from the hirsute future by a follicle singularity

I love the sound of that! Pretty awesome prose :)

Thank you! :) ;p xx ;p

I certainly hope so.

My husband's hair is thinning, between the anguish he feels and the guilt I feel for finding it unattractive, a cure would be fantastic. He wants to save up for a 20k transplant surgery, but I'm finding it hard to accept price wise when we have two kids.

I am glad that my recipe for balding is just shave it off instead of prolonging the suffering.

This isn't the cure-all people make it out to be. I tried it once and like 10 people all separately told me to grow it back.

There are plenty of people who look better with hair.

See if shaving all the hair off would help. It's what a lot of people do and it works as long as they "own" it. And importantly it works for certain kinds of heads, so a bit of imagining is required

It does also involve shaving the hair more frequently, so ideally you'd get a hair clipper for home use to save on costs.

I guess that would work for a lot of people, but I'm personally not attracted to bald men. So I think I'd prefer if my husband got the transplants, I think our only problem is money... but the more I think about it, it'll probably be worth it for our marriage in the long run.

I won't ask any questions to avoid embarrassing your husband on this forum where he can't defend himself, but I will note that if he isn't in good shape or dresses unfashionably (not necessarily stylish--simply clean clothes that fit well and flatter him), baldness will hit him much harder. You may help your relationship by assisting his improvement in those areas; if that's already the case and you really just can't stand baldness, alas.

Someone else in this thread said they got a hair transplant in Turkey for just $1,500, and from the pictures he posted the results were great!

Instead of dropping $20k, maybe you could think about a family holiday to Turkey, and your hubby could get a transplant while there?

Yep, thats a good idea.

This Reddit might be of interest: https://www.reddit.com/r/HairTransplants/.

This comment is rather interesting to me. If I understand what you are saying here is that unless your husband is willing to undergo cosmetic surgery the long-term probability of you two staying together goes down?

She's being insanely callous, as is fashionable to do on this website for some reason.

She's actually communicating quite reasonably and sounds pragmatic, not callous. I'm frankly astounded by the amount and severity of weirdly "normal" angry replies about this on HN ("normal" as in typical on the internet). Even on emotional topics, there's usually only one or two of those, and they often get flagged quickly.

I say this without anger but it makes me feel as uncomfortable and sad as if I'd read "if my wife doesn't get breast implants our marriage will suffer." I can't imagine saying that to someone I'm in a relationship with or how gutted I'd feel if someone asked that of me. Maybe it's the kind of honesty and pragmatism you reach after decades of marriage, but it's horrible to read from the outside.

I agree, and as a bald man myself, it's a tad surprising to read this from the spouse of a man who's currently only thinning - and someone they have two kids with. That thinning hair has been extrapolated to something that's irrevocably damaging to their marriage. I get it - a shiny pate isn't everybody's thing - but it's still surprising to read that it's worth losing a spouse and the father of your children over.

>irrevocably damaging to their marriage

>worth losing a spouse and the father of your children over.

Again, this is uncharitable exaggeration/rewording. Doing this to people perpetuates the unwillingness of many to speak honestly even at times when it would be ultimately beneficial.

I'm confused as to how this is at all uncharitable, here is a direct quote from the commenter: "I guess that would work for a lot of people, but I'm personally not attracted to bald men. So I think I'd prefer if my husband got the transplants, I think our only problem is money... but the more I think about it, it'll probably be worth it for our marriage in the long run."

Is it being uncharitable to assume that she thinks that her marriage will be negatively affected by her husband going bald? She specifically states she's not attracted to bald men, and says she'd be willing to spend money they don't currently have for him to get a hair transplant in order to save their marriage "in the long run".

No, this is refreshing communication. The alternative isn't hippy dippy paradise, it's suppressing the problem until they start fighting for "no reason" and then being unable to consider several of their better options because they weren't willing to talk about it.

This is a provocative and unnecessary rewording. Her meaning is plain. Tons of things affect relationships negatively - divorce is only one result of infinite, and you may phrase each negative event as "increasing the likelihood of divorce", but it serves no purpose.

> it'll probably be worth it for our marriage in the long run.

What are you gonna do when you both get old? You're going be a saggy-breasted wrinkly bag (might already be due to the kids) and so will he, best figure out your attitude problem now.

Being attracted to someone is not a choice. If people could trick their brain into being attracted to whoever they want, they would. I am afraid it is "built in" to a large extent. I agree with your sentiment, though. It is worth trying, but it is not as easy as an attitude adjustment.

Both of you are right, but if you plan to be married for life, it only goes downhill (with mild bursts of looking 5-10 years younger for a minute after you take up running in middle-age.)

it must be a troll...

While your concern is certainly very personal, and a deeply rooted preference over which you have little control, I have to point out that body shaming can have disastrous effects on the recipient[1].

Aging spares no one. Worth reflecting on.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_shaming

Get some muscles, a tan, and possibly grow some interesting facial hair.

All I can say is your relation looks very superficial that I'm not sure why are you married in the first place. What happens if either of you for some reason (like an accident) suffer physiological changes that "you don't find attractive"? Are you going to pack and leave? So sad.

geez, all they said was that they don't find their husband's baldness attractive.

This is an unrealistic, but common opinion due to how emotional the topic is. It's important to try to avoid adding hostility to the conversation because it "feels" justified. Nobody can control what they find attractive and unattractive, and attraction is an absolutely unavoidable component of most marital relationships. Some people focus on it unreasonably, and we consider them shallow, but it is impossible to _expect_ any arbitrary person to be utterly unaffected by it.

Fair enough, but we are also talking about normal human aging here - the vast majority of men will experience some level of hair loss over time. Expecting your male spouse to retain a juvenile hairline into later decades is unrealistic and shortsighted. Not attracted to bald men? Fine - majority of people aren't - but plenty of people are willing to overlook physiological maturation in their spouse over time.

> Nobody can control what they find attractive and unattractive, and attraction is an absolutely unavoidable component of most marital relationships. Some people focus on it unreasonably, and we consider them shallow, but it is impossible to _expect_ any arbitrary person to be utterly unaffected by it.

I don't think the mood in this thread is expecting her (I assume it's a woman) to be utterly unaffected by the normal, healthy aging almost all men undergo. I think we're a little taken aback that she's so repulsed by the idea of her two children's' father's thinning scalp.

This is a comment coming from someone with very limited experience in human condition

In my thirty's I shaved my balding head and spent my money on my teeth. No regrets.

He could start taking finasteride/propecia. If he was getting a hair transplant, he would have to take it anyway so his hairline doesn't recede further behind the transplanted hair.

I was using minoxonil for a while and it was just meh, I knew about propecia but the side-effects are bad and it messes with hormones. Discovered Hims makes a minoxonil + propecia combination topical. This combined with norizal shampoo lead to a massive difference in about 9 months. I only apply once a day, not twice a day like recommended so it could possibly be even better for me.

The Hims stuff is only $50/mo and I'm really stretching it out since I'm only applying half what they recommend. I really would recommend trying this out to anybody before going to implants.

Fly to Thailand, they do it for 4k over there. I know a guy who did it there, looked great.

he can have it for ~$3000 in Turkey consider having the surgery abroad

He can go to Istanbul and get it done for 1/4 the cost.

Along with "Major breakthrough in battery technology," this is a headline I read at least once every six months yet never actually see any tangible evidence of.

Here you go:

https://cnevpost.com/2022/07/21/nio-reaffirms-150-kwh-solid-...

And because NIO's battery packs are swappable you can upgrade your current NIO to the new 150 kWh battery.

I know it seems like those battery “breakthroughs” don’t pan out but in fact a lot of them do eventually get incorporated into commercial batteries. It mostly produces incremental improvements but if you look back at batteries you can see the changes.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

I like having hair - but baldness runs in my family.

I've been using topical hair treatments since my early 30's to keep what I have.

Its vain, laughable, and a trope - but it bothers me.

We could be doing more with research, things that help humanity more than this.. but I appreciate this quite a lot...

Well... if you read the article you would have seen that this research actually has the potential to help humanity greatly.

They were only using hair follicles because "...these are the only human organ that regenerates regularly and automatically". Their discovery may help guide our understanding for helping promote and control wound healing..

My friend, I did.

I appreciate this finding due to my own personal circumstances and I laud the researchers, my comment was more self deprecation over my own vanity.

All knowledge is worth having.

There's nothing really vain about wanting to look good. Eat the right foods, exercise, everyone _should_ be doing the basic things that make you look good. Cosmetic industry is slated to be valued over a trillion in the next few years, and that includes a lot of snake oil; good research that displaces snake oil remedies is a good thing. And I'm more than happy to see my tax dollars go into research that looks into baldness, even if only for folks who simply want hair.

Well, doing the right thing isn’t enough.

Looking good (being attractive) is mostly about immutable traits like height, physiognomy and until now having hair.

Unless you are terribly deformed, staying fit, personal hygiene, dressing well, and a pleasant demeanor are probably more important than the things you mentioned

> There's nothing really vain about wanting to look good.

Worrying too much about looking good is exactly what vanity means.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vanity

In days when women are denied bodily autonomy and medical treatment for serious health risks, we're worried about guaranteeing men control over their bodies through medical treatments for . . . baldness. Comparatively, it seems vain to me.

To fix the issue you're bringing up, we need different politicians and judges. There's not much for research scientists to do about it, and their funding sources generally can't be repurposed to politics either.

(Also worth mentioning that the research here could also help wound healing.)

"Vanity" means "vacuity".

There may be relative difference of substance, but there is not an absolute one. Appearances are not irrelevant.

Doesn't the liver also regularly regenerate with no scarring or anything? I thought that was one of the reasons behind our comparatively absurd alcohol tolerance as a species

Depends if you think of it in terms of Mill's utilitarianism.

It makes a lot of people unhappy, curing it would reduce a lot of mental stress, and though it is low level, it could be argued that curing it is a greater priority than curing many life threatening diseases, because they affect a much smaller amount of people.

Think you need to embrace it, I look at pictures of a time where I was still holding on and now I cringe. I guarantee you will feel better if you just shave it. The only people who look bad are the ones who are balding, not the ones who are bald.

Look at video of Steve Ballmer. Say what you want about the man but his bald sure does not get in the way of his alpha.

Vin Diesel, The Rock, Bruce Willis, Jason Statham, Michael Jordan, hell even throw in Jeff Bezos. Why would being bald have anything to do with how alpha you are.

One of those things is not like the others.

Also subjectively all but Bezos look good bald. Bezos to me looks every bit the evil Lex Luthor he is.

"embrace it" is easy to say for someone that doesn't have a head shaped like Kryten from Red Dwarf

I also felt better after accepting my baldness.

Patrick Stewart can be an inspiration in this regard: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pXOK-ZVJMaU

I agree if they have serious thinning/balding, but plenty of men have relatively mild thinning that can be treated with only minoxidil.

Being bald has a negative effect on reproductive success, so I don't think it's trivial. All things being relative, sure, other more important things could have been researched, but not wanting to be bald isn't pure vanity.

But it has positive reproductive success for other not bald people

Never wanted to reproduce, so that didn’t particularly bother me. On the other hand, I don’t seem to have any problem finding willing sexual partners.

If that were true it wouldn't be so common

To be fair, historically you were pumping out babies by 22. Balding in your late 20's or 30's simply meant dad was going bald.

Making men less attractive after they have babies may actually improve reproductive fitness by helping solving the females-side's dilemma of being able to keep some co-carers / resource providers / companion around for the raising of the "offspring". So I don't think it's as simple as "less sex-attractive men" (if that's even true, I don't have any anecdotal evidence that bald men are less attractive to women in any way except what women say they are attracted to, but talk about attractiveness and partner choices are often independent in reality...but it may be true I don't study it), or "less sex-attractive after some time horizon" leads to lower reproductive fitness.

And dead by 40, so it didn't matter very much at all.

My hair started graying out before 40. I just cut it very short. No hair is better than gray hair for me. I don't need to be remineded that I inhabit this decaying carcass that will fall apart in mere decades.

Um...you can dye your hair.

Buggers grow too fast for my liking.

A hair transplant is also an option and relatively affordable nowadays (I paid 1600$ for mine, in Turkey). I was initially skeptical and had very low expectations but in the end, I'm very happy with the result. Normally, you don't lose the transplanted hairs because they are taken from the region of your head that doesn't go bald.

Here's a pic of me shortly before (left) and a few months after (right): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/olalonde/olalonde.github.c...

Edit: Thanks for the compliments :) To answer a few questions:

I was already visiting Turkey for a friend's wedding at the time so I didn't need to get a complete package with accommodation, etc. In fact, I decided to do the transplant on a whim, partly because my friend wouldn't stop bugging me about it (I'm glad he did in retrospect). I decided to do it, went for a consultation the following day, and had the operation the day after that.

I don't know what truth there is to this but I supposedly got a good deal because I didn't need transport, accommodation, etc. They politely asked me to keep the price to myself, so I feel ambivalent about posting the clinic here but I'll happily reply to emails (see profile).

Normally I'd have said nothing wrong with shaving it all off, but your transplant does look worth it, it's transformative. Thanks for sharing the comparison

It looks fantastic.

Care to share the service you used?....for a friend ofc.

Wow, the second photo looks so natural!

If you don't mind me asking, how much hair did you have before the procedure? (I assume you used to shave your head, as it's totally bald in the first pic)

Good question. I did have some hair left, but I lost enough that I felt shaving was a better option. Here's a pic I took a bit before the operation where you can see some of my surviving hair: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/olalonde/olalonde.github.c...

If I recall correctly, I had over 3K grafts. It did make a big difference.

It's hard to tell, but it looks like you had more than me :) I prefer a close-crop "number 2", but it's getting so I'll switch to "number 1" soon, I think! Luckily I kind of suit it.

How long did the procedure take?

It was a long time, I think 8 hours. But I was able to watch some movies on Netflix.

Dude, you look really good now!

Can you share the namenofnthe clinic that did this?

Looks great! Also following for the name of the clinic…

Damn, it looks that legit? And it's only $1500 in Turkey (plus flight/stay)?

Welp, when the time comes I know where to go now.

Yes but just for the operation, it didn't include the flight/stay. There are actually cheaper clinics if cost is an issue (my Turkish friend did his transplant for 500$).

That's great to know. Thanks for sharing the info

If you decided to cut your hair very short, how would it look? Would it look natural or would the transplants look artificial?

It looks pretty natural. I don't think it would be noticeable to an untrained eye.

Would be great to find an alternative to the dangerous finasteride, dutasteride and insufficient minoxidil we have.

To anyone reading this: Minoxidil + fin/dut will turn back your balding by a few years and stabilize it for more than a decade, in almost every man.

Yet fin/dut can cause brain fog, depression, anxiety and low libido. Some claim those side effects can be permanent, even after stopping the drugs.

Bonus tip: 5mg oral minoxidil is vastly superior to twice daily 5% topical application. One can drink the topical solution if pills can not be acquired.

Bonus tip 2: Microneedling weekly massively improves results.

Finasteride gave me severe depression and loss of libido. After stopping it I am fine. I am on 5-15mg oral min a day.

If you have any questions, let me know. I am very confident in my knowledge of male pattern hair loss / AGA in men.

Does minoxidil alone have any of those potential side effects, perhaps at a lesser incidence? I wouldn't mind extending my hairspan a few years, but I'm unwilling to risk long term side effects. I'm leaning towards avoiding taking anything.

((low dosage) oral) Minoxidil has a range of tolerable, transient side effects. There is zero scientific discussion about it causing permanent side effects.

But there are online communities that claim Minoxidil permanently ruined their skin, eyes, immune system, joints and killed their pet with an ax. Just like with Finasteride.

Most of the alleged finasteride side effects are perfectly vague things that happen to people all the time for all kinds of reasons. While there are plausible (logically, not in terms of empirical evidence) arguments for how finasteride could be causing some of these things, nobody can explain how they could ever be permanent. Or how they would only affect a tiny subset of users despite triggering all the same mechanisms in every user.

I can't think of too many other drugs that get so much hate on the Internet with so little to show for it. Even with the often controversial psychiatric drugs, most will stop short of claiming their lives were irrevocably destroyed forever. But with finasteride any claim seems to be fair game. And quite coincidentally, people on these hair loss sites often make the exact same claims about hair loss itself. It seems to me some simply choose to blame finasteride instead.

> nobody can explain how they could ever be permanent

Epigenetic changes. Easy as that.

I am not about to argue if PFS is real though. I haven‘t formed my opinion on that and probably never will, because one can‘t prove it doesn‘t exist, unfortunately.

For me it‘s serious side effects were completely transient.

Epigenetics are interesting, but is finasteride's epigentic action uniquely interesting? Not too familiar with the latest on epigenetics, but a few quick Google searches suggest nearly every heavily-researched drug produces some kind of an epigenetic effect.

I don't think it's impossible something is going on. I just feel like in the realm of medical controversies it's one of the least substantial. Even if some lasting physical effect can be proven, it's still a long way from there to lasting mental anguish.

How convinced are you it caused your depression? Did you try taking it again?

I don't know what the percentage of people affected is, but I suffered nearly complete loss of libido that crept up on me and took a couple of months to return after ~1 year on propecia.

I don't think I've gone a full month in my life without even having morning wood before or since (and that wasn't a high-stress time in my life or anything).

https://web.archive.org/web/20220729052903/https://www.indep...

The linked article appears to be entirely copied from the University of California press release. https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/07/25/chemical-controllin..., which is a much better source of information.

Also, here is a link to the actual paper published in Biophysical Journal.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2022.05.035

(Stolen from the last time progress was posted on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26250907)

"You would hope that by the 24th century, humanity would have come up with a cure for baldness"

"You would hope that by the 24th century, humanity would no longer care"

Is there the opposite? Can I have a pill/cream that just removes all my head hair so I don't need to worry about shaving it or let it grow into a stupid incontrollable mess?

You can get laser hair removal. Not so easy but it works

A cream with DHT or a DHT derivative (Masterone, etc) may accomplish that.

That would be awesome. It reminds me that in the book ready player one they have a shampoo that gets rid of all your hair.

I don't think anybody wants to get rid of their hair entirely. I just wish there was a way to slow it down so I don't have to get a haircut every other week.

> I don't think anybody wants to get rid of their hair entirely.

You should be a lot more imaginative. The world is very big.

This is me! As a kid I couldn't wait to have a beard, and always had 'pretty hair'.

Now as an adult I have a rough beard and baby soft scalp hair. The extreme difference in how it feels bothers me to no end, but women dig it so they ask me to grow it out.

Both look good grown out, but I hate being bothered by it. Beards need to be upkept and mine can be itchy the 1st few nonths. Long scalp hair loojs good but is such a pain, especially in the summer. And mine being so soft every small puff of wind can and will blow it in my face and eyes, I'm constantly moving it back out of my face.

So I prefer short as possible but it never ends up that way =(

I always think of Rikus the Mul from the Dark Sun boom series. Half human and half dwarf they were completely hairless. I would love that.

No shaving, no haircuts, no being embarrassed by hairdressers playing with my hair and turning red when they compliment me. I don't know why this only happens 'in the chair'.

I've wished for a laser system that could run down my body and just shave everything but my eyebrows. If need-be I could get used to no eyebrows.

I'd gladly sell my head hair for people's transplants if they ever get that figured out.

I’ve used Nair before. They have or had various creams you leave on for <10 minutes and they chemically remove hair.

The problem is a lot of the creams might be too harsh for your scalp. The other problem is they don’t remove 100% of the hairs so you might still need to go over the area with a razor.

They were still great when I used them, though. IMO they’re easier to use than shaving.

it takes two minutes to shave your head! even less if you get one of those shower mirrors that doesn’t fog up. why mess around with creams?

This article comes by coincidence soon after a dialogue between me and my barber:

-- Have you read those articles about covid and baldness, published in the past week?

-- Not just read about it: I saw it. Especially those who have lived the worse conditions. A devastation on the head. Then, after months, they regrow.

-- ...They regrow?!

-- Yes. Initially, a complete mess on the skin. But later, hair regrows.

-- ...Extremely interesting.

Now, cures against baldness constitute a trillion dollar market. Surely beyond the wealth generated by the leading online vendor, as photographic evidence of his founder has us entail. (Even Hollywood, I remember as I write, stressed this in the most dramatic terms, during the latest "Oscars" ceremony.) Some intriguing mechanisms are even being revealed with the pandemic (skimmers: it is not at all granted that hair regrowth will involve past losses). Hopefully, research on TGF-beta will unlock...

I lost patches of hair during my 1st Covid illness. Not just on my head, but chest and leg, too. It was all on the left side of my body, which is weird. When the hair grew back it was thicker & darker than it has been in 30 years(I'm 50 now, some grey hairs, but the rest is mostly thin, bland). People have been giving me skeptical reactions to my hair loss claim for the last two years. I am vindicated! And... still mostly bald.

I noticed a weird patch on the outside of my right leg where no hair grows a few years ago.

> When the hair grew back it was thicker & darker than it has been in 30 years

So my initial hunch during the chat with my barber, "If we have found hints to cure to baldness - and hidden in covid, to make history more interesting..." was probably not just the humour of the moment, after all!

Going bald was a blessing in disguise for me; shaved all my hair off and have never looked back. Not having to fuss with hair is a time saver and stress reducer. Great news for those who want it, but i'm never going to go unshaved again anyway.

They are disrupting the timeline, Picard is going to have hair like Fabio now..

It appears that Jeff Beck (age 75) already got treated with that!

(if that's not a wig.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC02wGj5gPw

> Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, found that a sole chemical[, TGF-beta, ]is responsible for hair follicles dividing and dying[: such chemical] could «not only treat baldness, but ultimately speed wound healing»

> «Even when a hair follicle kills itself, it never kills its stem cell reservoir. When the surviving stem cells receive the signal to regenerate, they divide, make new cell and develop into a new follicle»

Original press release from Uni Cal-Riverside:

https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2022/07/25/chemical-controllin...

> [Qixuan Wang, mathematical biologist and study co-author: ]«our new research gets us closer to understanding stem cell behavior, so that we can control it and promote wound healing»

> The liver and stomach regenerate themselves in response to wounds. However, Wang’s team studied hair follicles because they’re the only organ in humans that regenerates automatically and periodically, even without injury

> As with many chemicals, it is the amount that makes the difference. If the cell produces a certain quantity of TGF-beta, it activates cell division. Too much of it causes apoptosis

> If scientists can determine more precisely the way TGF-beta activates cell division, and how the chemical communicates with other important genes, it might be possible to activate follicle stem cells and stimulate hair growth

Original research article:

A probabilistic Boolean model on hair follicle cell fate regulation by TGF-β - https://www.cell.com/biophysj/fulltext/S0006-3495(22)00428-3

> Hair follicles (HFs) are mini skin organs that undergo cyclic growth. Various signals regulate HF cell fate decisions jointly. Recent experimental results suggest that transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) exhibits a dual role in HF cell fate regulation that can be either anti- or pro-apoptosis. To understand the underlying mechanisms of HF cell fate control, we develop a novel probabilistic Boolean network (pBN) model on the HF epithelial cell gene regulation dynamics. First, the model is derived from literature, then refined using single-cell RNA sequencing data. Using the model, we both explore the mechanisms underlying HF cell fate decisions and make predictions that could potentially guide future experiments: 1) we propose that a threshold-like switch in the TGF-β strength may necessitate the dual roles of TGF-β in either activating apoptosis or cell proliferation, in cooperation with bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and at different stages of a follicle growth cycle; 2) our model shows concordance with the high-activator-low-inhibitor theory of anagen initiation; 3) we predict that TNF may be more effective in catagen initiation than TGF-β, and they may cooperate in a two-step fashion; 4) finally, predictions of gene knockout and overexpression reveal the roles in HF cell fate regulations of each gene. Attractor and motif analysis from the associated Boolean networks reveal the relations between the topological structure of the gene regulation network and the cell fate regulation mechanism. A discrete spatial model equipped with the pBN illustrates how TGF-β and TNF cooperate in initiating and driving the apoptosis wave during catagen

I didn't read the article, but from your quote, the wound healing aspect would be amazing; a legit Wolverine Factor!

"But sadly, the greatest minds and resources were focused on conquering hair loss ..."

Sorry, I just couldn't help myself.

I remember a Seinfeld episode about this about 30 years ago.

"He say you grow hair! Look like Stalin!"

"Are there any side-effects?"

"...impotence".

I always wondered if he really said Stalin considering Stalin had great hair.

Either that or he said 'starling' .

Just like "male birth control" news that come out once a year and disappear into nothingness? This site just needs their ad revenue.

Link without paywall: https://archive.ph/pweIq

There’s usually no free lunch in biochemistry.

I always picture it like a gigantic switchboard of unlabeled knobs. Turn one a little, and something desirable happens. But other things happen, too.

To make it worse you can always find people who are exceptions to strange connections.

Cure already exists - finasteride

Commented as controversial nearby, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278252

We already had a cure for MPB, anti androgens. There might be some side affects though.

baldness has been reflecting light back, slowing down climate change, why would we ever wanna cure baldness unless I’m missing something here…

Hats. It’s hats.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com