Stem Cells: Man’s New Hope for Hair Loss

Fresh insight into the role of stem cells may signal new hope for balding men everywhere. So just how close are we to the cure? And will you make the “cut” when we get there?

For most of their well-known time in the universe, men have faced a common battle transcending cultural or socioeconomic barriers. It’s the same fight faced by your father, and your father’s father, and every other man who ever made it past 40. Caesar, Shakespeare, and Churchill all fought it. Chances are, you will too.

For the broad majority of men, baldness still remains the scourge of our vanities. Maybe it gets to us because, on a psychological level, aging represents a loss of virility, symbolized by hair loss. Or maybe it’s simply because—like aging—we can only control it so much.

The fear of balding continues to persist in an age increasingly obsessed with youth and the preservation of vitality. Baldness continues to represent some fundamental, inescapable, awful truths for men: You will get old. It will not be pretty. People will think differently of you. One day you will wilt, and eventually, die. Baldness reminds those of us doomed to it that we are masters of our destiny only so much. We are men, and men can do great, impossible, incredible things. But we can’t fight the tide.

Or so we’ve thought.

Recent news of a promising new breakthrough in remedying baldness has heads buzzing. Thanks to a bunch of mice who demonstrated in a laboratory setting that dormant follicular stem cells can be stimulated to cause the regeneration of hair, there might be hope for you yet.

Earlier this year, a group of scientists led by George Costarellis at the University of Pennsylvania discovered that male pattern baldness may arise from a problem with the activation of cells rather than the numbers of cells (or thought-to-be “dead” cells) in the heads of bald men. Basically: Even though it appears as though bald heads have less hair than others, they actually just have less active hair follicles, those ports in your head from which hair grows. Apparently, there is a difference.