Men Losing Hair
Suggested lead: New studies seem to suggest that your hair could tell you if there's a chance you might be headed for heart or prostate trouble. Tom Britt has more.
How a man loses his hair could be an indication of potential health problems. Two studies at Duke University Medical Center seem to show that a man who starts losing his hair from the crown, called "vertex" baldness, is twice as likely to suffer prostate cancer as the man who has a receding hairline, also called "male pattern baldness." Urology research professor Wendy Demark was the lead author of the studies. She says there's no need to panic, even if you are starting to get a little thin on top.
"This is the first study that's looked at vertex baldness and prostate cancer. At this point in time, although our study seems to have some very interesting findings, it's a little bit too early to really make that call right now. It has to be followed up by other work."
Demark says her results do tie in with another study at Harvard University, that shows a link between vertex baldness and heart disease. Demark has put out a call for other researchers to share any information they might have to either support or challenge the Duke findings. I'm Tom Britt.
Demark says she is hoping that other researchers will help provide additional data on whether they have found a link between vertex baldness and prostate cancer.
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"Our studies are small, and we're basically putting this finding out to the scientific community so that if anybody has any large data sets, and large cohorts that they're following that they could follow up on this and hopefully get the results in short order."
