Hair Loss and Men's Health

Hair Loss and Men's Health

Bald is beautiful, but it may be bad news for some African-American men.

In a brand new study from the University of Pennsylvania, researchers were able to make a connection between baldness and increased risk of prostate cancer among African-American men. The age of the patient and the type of baldness both playing important roles.

Using questionnaires, the team asked 318 black men with prostate cancer and 219 without the disease about their hair patterns at age 30. Those with any degree of baldness had a 69-percent higher risk of prostate cancer.

Participants who were bald in the front were more than twice as likely to have been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. The association was even stronger in men with frontal balding diagnosed with prostate cancer before age 60, where researchers found a sixfold increase in dangerous advanced stage prostate cancer.

African-American men are at high risk for developing prostate cancer, and twice as likely to die from it than other groups.

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in American men, behind only lung cancer.

Source: www.nlm.nih.gov