Heads up for the bald; a treatment may be near
Author: Gemma Haines
Date: Sun, Mar 27 2011
Source: reuters.com
More than half of all men and four in ten women will suffer from some form of hair loss during their lives. While there are countless treatments that preserve hair, there are none that actually re-grow it.
But for those battling baldness - help may be on the way. Researchers at the University of California say they accidentally stumbled upon a powerful hair-growing compound, while examining stress in mice.
Dr Million Mulugeta says he and his team were studying how stress affects gastrointestinal function using mice that had been genetically modified to over-produce a stress hormone called corticotrophin-releasing factor, or CRF. The altered mice lost the hair on their backs, as if they were going bald. But as the researchers monitored the animals' treatment, they made a surprising discovery.
Dr Million Mulugeta, UCLA, saying "We noticed that some of these mice that were injected with a blocker of the stress hormone receptor, three months later they had fully re-grown their hair. That was a total surprise for us, we were not prepared."
The stress hormone blocker, known as astressin-B, had strong and long-lasting effects. The hair re-growth among the bald mice was so effective, they could no longer be distinguished from the others.
Dr Million Mulugeta, UCLA, saying "The antagonist we injected is very small, it is in micrograms it is in millionths of a gram, a single injection per day and five injections, that was enough to reverse hair loss."
The question now is whether astressin-B would have the same results on humans.
Dr Million Mulugeta, UCLA, saying "Whether it works in humans or not is something we are very much interested in and something that we want to follow through. For now we don't know but some evidence that gives us hope that it may work, if not for several forms of hair loss at least for the subset of populations that suffer from stress-related hair loss."
It's enough, says Dr Mulugeta, to justify further research. He says that while an effective treatment for baldness may be many years away, his lab mice, have opened a new door for discovery.
