Epigenetics, Diet, Smoking, and Hair Loss – Part 3

This is the final part of our post on epigenetics. Part 1 of this series can be found here, and part 2 can be found here.

—

I continue to hear from patients who say they look like their dad or their grandfather, but “he has more hair and lost hair much later in life” and this suggests environmental issues that are impacting and accelerating the epigenetic changes influencing the timing and degree of male generic hair loss. It will be helpful to our patients if we can learn more about them.

Stress is also an important factor in hair loss. I saw a 45 year old man go from almost full head of hair to a Norwood class 6 pattern balding in just half a year, as his 6 year old daughter died after a difficult bout of leukemia. The stress must have been enormous.

Dr. Richard Shiell wrote that smoking is an interesting factor and he tried to do some trials about 30 years ago. The strange thing is that his hair transplant patients were all such “health freaks” that after 6 months he had not gathered more than one or two smokers, so the trial was given up. I know many surgeons attribute poor-growth of transplants to post-operative smoking, but this was never able to be confirmed and occasional “poor” results may have been due to other factors.

The real issue is to see if there may be dietary manipulations that can benefit our patients. If we think there may be a way to do that, we should not leave it in the hands of someone who has questionable ethics, but we should not ignore any useful message we get from dietary supplements in the epigenetic story as it unfolds.

—

This post was in part taken from an email sent by the brilliant Dr. Sharon Keene in Tucson, Arizona.