Baldiness

Genetic Cause for Female Baldness Found

by Bald Man on May 22nd, 2006

At ScienCentral is a story about researcher Angela Christiano and her team.

Genetics researcher Angela Christiano may have a full head of hair now, but for several years the same disease caused large clumps of her hair to fall out.

“It’s terrifying actually to discover that you’re losing your hair suddenly,” says Christiano, a molecular geneticist at Columbia University Medical Center. “It’s not just a cosmetic disease, it has profound psychological affects on the individuals who are affected.”

While she’s lucky that her hair grew back, the experience led her to look for the root cause of the disease.

Christiano and her team use a technique called comparative genetics or genomics, which maps human disease genes and traces them back to known gene mutations in animals, like the hairless mouse. “Comparative genetics is really a fancy word for something that we’ve been doing for a long time,” she says. “It’s simply the ability to take one organism’s genome and compare it computationally to another one.”

So far they’ve cracked the genetic code, not for alopecia, but for three other rare, inherited forms of hair loss.

“It’s not clear yet, at least not obviously clear, how the genes that we’ve discovered will lead to treatments for hair loss for patients with alopecia,” Christiano says.

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