European Research Concludes MPB is from Maternal Side?
Hey guys thanks for answering this question,
Recently European research has come to the conclusion that the maternal inheritance is a main factor for MPB, which is great news for me since my mother’s father and her brother have great heads of hair at a late age. My dad and his brother have great hair as well though their father (my paternal grand father) was completely bald. What are the chances that I have inherited his hair? Impossible since MPB is not a single gene thus his baldness has not been passed to my father and his brother?
Thanks so much for evaluating this
While male pattern baldness may be passed from either the maternal side or paternal side, there are still other factors, such as expression of the balding gene (or genes), that determine if a man is going to bald. Men get their balding gene from the mother’s side in about 52% of cases (if you got it from your mother’s side, then it is 100% for you and no longer 52%). In either case, it may be impossible to plan real statistical probability based upon either your mother’s or father’s balding pattern. You may have the gene, but simply do not express it.
If you are balding due to genetics, you will have the gene from your mother or your father and unless you want to use the research as an excuse to blame your parent a bit more, it does not really matter in the end. There is a new test for balding genetics called HairDX. Maybe this will give you some insights into your question which I can not address.
Where are you getting this 52%-down-the-mother’s-line statistic from? That is not stated anywhere in the literature. I have read numerous times that the maternal transmission rates is in the range of 70-72%, and that MPB sufferers carry the implicated AR variant 95% of time.
Also, why is it presumed that men get/got baldness directly from their (bald) father when their immediate maternal male relatives (grandfather and uncles) aren’t bald? It could still have come from her side.
In essence, my argument is that MPB is largely maternal/X-linked because women rarely inherit such a pattern. I understand that women’s hormonal profile is different from men’s, but the flipside too is that female pattern hair loss seems to require another bald FEMALE relative. I’ve never heard of a woman with FPHL due to the bald male relatives in her family.