I’ve seen you mention many times that bulk analysis is a good way to determine if someone is balding and that density should be the same everywhere for a non balding patient.

But I’m not convinced by this – I recently saw a well known hair transplant surgeon and he said that people typically have less density around the crown and temple areas anyway. He didn’t believe in bulk analysis for analysing hair loss.

Today I saw a male child who must have been around 8 years old. His hair was shaved short and sure enough, his temple/corner areas were noticeably less dense than the rest of his hair and this went quite a way back (I suppose to the point where someone might have suggested he was between a NW2 and NW3 on a balding scale if he was an adult).

You may not be convinced of the value in measuring hair bulk, but I am not going to try to convince you.

In a non-balding man, the bulk analysis shows that the hair in the 4 areas we measure (down the midline: front, top, crown and donor area) are all within 10% of the measurement of each other. I do not measure the hair at the sides of the head, because that is not where the balding will be. I would therefore possibly agree with you that the side densities are not as high as the midline densities.

Out of curiosity, I will measure a non-balding man’s sides and see if we are both correct.

Snippet from the article:

Scientists have moved a step closer to the goal of creating stem cells perfectly matched to a patient’s DNA in order to treat diseases, they announced on Thursday, creating patient-specific cell lines out of the skin cells of two adult men.

The advance, described online in the journal Cell Stem Cell, is the first time researchers have achieved “therapeutic cloning” of adults. Technically called somatic-cell nuclear transfer, therapeutic cloning means producing embryonic cells genetically identical to a donor, usually for the purpose of using those cells to treat disease.

But nuclear transfer is also the first step in reproductive cloning, or producing a genetic duplicate of someone – a technique that has sparked controversy since the 1997 announcement that it was used to create Dolly, the clone of a ewe. In 2005, the United Nations called on countries to ban it, and the United States prohibits the use of federal funds for either reproductive or therapeutic cloning.

Read the rest — In a cloning first, scientists create stem cells from adults

Snippet from the article:

Scientists have found a surprisingly simple way to turn mature cells back into a primitive state. Simply giving mouse blood cells an acid bath is enough to produce so-called pluripotent cells that can develop into any cell type in the body, they report in two new papers this week. The remarkable transformation contradicts many assumptions about cell biology and may ultimately lead to new ways to treat disease and injuries.

Scientists not involved in the work say the technique could be a game-changer if it pans out. “If this new approach is applicable to human cells, it would have great implications for regenerative medicine,” says Hongkui Deng, a stem cell researcher at Peking University in Beijing. “It’s quite surprising” that the technique “doesn’t involve any genetic manipulation,” says Rudolf Jaenisch, a developmental biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read the rest — Acid Treatment Could Provide Breakthrough Stem Cell Technique

But wait…. the above snippet is from an article that was published and appeared in many publications, but then the scientific community tried to replicate the study. Now there are many other publications that show how the attempts to replicate these results were unsuccessful. Read more about the investigation here.

For those interested in hair breakthroughs, this report could have been significant and prompted considerable excitement for creating stem cells that could be turned into hair cells, but without direct support by the greater scientific community, this was probably another blind end for stem cell development.

Doc,

You’ve been a kind internet friend. I’ve sent questions and thoughts, and you have posted them.

Question: Remember Michael Keaton? Love this guy. Huge in the 1980’s….but clearly balding (Mr. Mom, Gung Ho, Clean and Sober, Beetlejuice). When he was cast as Batman (1989) he clearly had some work done. Cosmetic. Surgery. Blah Blah. Blah.

Now in 2014, promoting Robocop (the reboot) he tells tales of the bat suit and has CLEARLY had work done in. Check the video out (here).

Your thoughts? It looks painful……..(the redness above the occipital bone). Come on. He’s rich. WTF hasn’t he had that cleaned up?

I am not sure that I see what you are talking about…

Michael Keaton has very visible male pattern baldness from what I can see in the video you sent. I’ve attached a photo from 2013 on the right that shows he’s losing his hair. I don’t clearly see any work done here.

It is entirely possible that Hollywood movie magic (hairpieces or styling tricks) were used in many of his past film roles.

Snippet from the article:

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

Read the rest — Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers

Great, now spam has infiltrated the science journals.

Snippet from the article:

American adults consume on average about 15% of their calories from sugars added to foods during processing, with a whopping 37% of the added sugar consumed in sugar-sweetened beverages, suggests an analysis of data extending back about 25 years. Moreover, the study projects that regularly drinking as little as one 12-ounce sugary soda a day may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease by about 30%—independent of total calories, obesity, or other risk factors.

“Our findings indicate that most US adults consume more added sugar than is recommended for a healthy diet,” write Dr Quanhe Yang (Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA) and colleagues in their report published online February 3, 2014 in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Read the rest — A Soda a Day Ups CVD Risk by 30%: NHANES Study

We have to think twice when we drink soda, as it seems that nothing is really safe. Maybe we should starve?

Snippet from the article:

Although some people spend countless dollars on antioxidant supplements to improve their health, many studies have found that these would-be panaceas could actually exacerbate the diseases they claim to prevent.

Now, a team of Swedish scientists has shown that two antioxidants—vitamin E and N-acetylcysteine (NAC)—can fuel the growth of lung cancers in mice. The team also worked out why.

Antioxidants protect cells from chemically unstable molecules called reactive oxygen species (ROS), which can easily react with DNA and cause damage that leads to cancer. But Martin Bergo’s team at the University of Gothenburg showed that antioxidants neutralize ROS in tumors as well as healthy cells. “If we give extra antioxidants in the diet, we’re helping the tumor to reduce radicals that would otherwise block its growth,” Bergo said. “Then it can speed up all it wants.”

Read the rest — Antioxidants Speed Up Lung Cancer

This may bust the modern thought that antioxidants are good for everyone. Although this was discovered in mice, we need to pay attention to such publications.