Baldness 'May Give You a Heart Attack'; GOOD HEALTH
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| Baldness 'May Give You a Heart Attack'; GOOD HEALTH |
ASTONISHING new research claims that one of the most important factors in determining if you'll suffer future heart disease lies in the hair on your head - or at least, lack of it.
Doctors now believe that baldness could be a strong risk factor in future heart attacks and stroke.
Harvard Medical School researchers found that a man's increased chances of cardiac problems can be predicted from how fast hair loss is occurring, when it started - and even its location on the head.
Why men suffer from so much more heart disease than women could be that men have higher testosterone levels.
Testosterone is a vital hormone, yet too much of it can be harmful. It raises blood pressure, it causes water retention - which in turn raises blood pressure even further - it can thicken artery walls by depositing too much fat, and increases the tendency of blood to clot - all factors which raise chances of a heart attack.
One sign of higher testosterone levels is baldness, though no one knows why high testosterone causes it. Recent research has discovered that the skin on your scalp is more sensitive to testosterone than much of the rest of the body.
In this latest medical trial, more than 22,000 American male doctors aged between 40 and 84 were checked for 11 years to investigate the male risk factors for heart disease.
Of all determinants used by doctors to predict who will be prone to coronary disease, baldness appears to be the third strongest risk factor, below high blood pressure and fat deposits in the eye.
The researchers were careful to consider that baldness increases with age and any association between baldness and heart problems could be a spurious association due to old age.
The key finding was that for men of the same age, suffering more hair loss was a definite danger to the heart, and baldness persisted as an important risk factor for coronary problems, even when age is taken into account
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