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What Baldness and Cancer Might Have in Common
What Baldness and Cancer Might Have in Common
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0:00
Hair can be a really important part of how we see ourselves.
0:03
And that means losing it can be a stressful event.
0:06
If you choose to embrace the naked dome, there are whole subreddits devoted to
0:11
enthusiastically supporting you in that decision.
0:13
But losing your hair can still feel like a really big deal,
0:16
and the treatment options we have are limited and costly.
0:20
Science is hard at work, though, and a recent finding might crack our understanding wide open.
0:25
And it’s not just baldness!
0:27
This research could lead to breakthroughs in how we understand how cells grow and
0:31
divide… and that means a cure for baldness could help us study cancer.
0:37
Here’s why.
0:38
[♪ INTRO]
0:42
Though we typically associate balding with men and older age,
0:45
people of any gender and life stage can experience baldness.
0:48
It can happen for a wide variety of reasons,
0:51
but in a general sense, baldness is when your hair follicles stop producing hair.
0:55
See, a strand of hair itself is not alive – it’s basically
0:59
a stack of dead cells surrounding a bunch of proteins, mostly keratin.
1:03
Your hair is made by the living hair follicle,
1:06
which sits in the middle to lower layers of your skin.
1:09
To produce your luscious locks, hair follicles alternate between
1:12
growing and resting in a process driven by a bunch of hair follicle stem cells.
1:17
The longer the growth period, the longer the hair gets,
1:19
and each type of hair on your body has different growing times.
1:23
That’s why you don’t have to worry about your eyelashes or armpit hair growing three feet long!
1:27
After the growth stage, the hair follicle enters a rest
1:29
period in which the hair stops getting longer, and it eventually falls out.
1:33
Then, new hair cells fill in the empty follicle, and the cycle begins again.
1:38
Unless… it doesn’t.
1:40
If no new hair comes to replace an old one that fell out, you get baldness.
1:45
Technically, any type of baldness is called alopecia, although that term is
1:48
mostly used in conversation to refer to the autoimmune condition called alopecia areata,
1:54
when the body attacks its own hair follicles.
1:56
Another type of hair loss is called androgenetic alopecia, commonly known as male pattern baldness.
2:02
This is a largely genetic condition.
2:04
Male pattern baldness is a bit of a misnomer – androgenetic
2:07
alopecia can affect people of any gender.
2:10
It gives people with more testosterone in their body that typical M-shaped
2:13
hairline that recedes over time, but people with more estrogen in their
2:16
body tend to get more of a widening hair part than a receding hairline.
2:20
While your hair can sometimes grow back,
2:22
depending on the reason for the baldness, that may not be the case.
2:26
And we don’t really have any cures to prevent unwanted baldness for good.
2:30
One of the most common treatments for baldness is minoxidil, also known by the brand name Rogaine.
2:34
We’re not fully clear on how exactly minoxidil works,
2:38
but it seems to extend the growth phase of your hair follicles.
2:40
It also possibly increases blood flow to the scalp,
2:43
which helps to bring more nutrients to your hair.
2:46
However it works, applying minoxidil to your scalp twice daily has been shown to
2:50
slow down the rate of hair loss and increase the number of hairs per square centimeter,
2:54
in the early stages of hair thinning.
2:56
Another common hair loss treatment,
2:57
called finasteride, is a prescription pill that is only FDA-approved for men.
3:02
Finasteride works by preventing the testosterone in your body
3:04
from converting into a different molecule that stops hair growth.
3:08
Unfortunately, some men have reported some serious mental health side effects.
3:12
Plus, it may increase the risk of developing prostate and breast cancer.
3:16
Rosemary oil is an over the counter option,
3:18
but the clinical evidence for its benefits is not rock solid.
3:21
And of course, you could get a hair transplant!
3:24
Transplants are considered to be a permanent fix, but they are much more complicated and expensive.
3:29
So, given the current options on the market, it’s no surprise that people are very interested in
3:34
identifying a longer term solution to baldness
3:37
And we’ll talk more about some new progress after this quick break.
3:41
Thanks to our Presidents of Science, Binorthedrunkdwarf, Charlie Stanley,
3:46
Harry Plumley, and Raz Tirosh, for supporting this SciShow video!
3:50
They make it possible for you to watch these videos and learn for free.
3:53
Our Presidents of Science work along with other patrons on Patreon and viewers who comment on
3:59
videos and share them, all so that knowledge and curiosity can reach as far and wide as possible.
4:05
The donations made on SciShow’s Patreon pay part of the team’s salaries.
4:09
SciShow’s editors, producers, animators, and everyone else on the whole team who put
4:14
together multiple high quality, fact-based, and beautifully designed videos every week.
4:19
And our Presidents of Science help us make a fair salary doing all of that.
4:23
If you’d like to join our Presidents of Science in financially supporting it all,
4:26
you can do that at patreon.com/SciShow.
4:30
In order to develop a treatment for baldness,
4:32
it helps to know what’s causing it in the first place.
4:35
In 2025, a team of researchers looked into
4:38
a protein at the center of this process, called MCL-1.
4:41
MCL-1 is a protein that prevents apoptosis, or programmed cell death.
4:46
Since hair follicles go through apoptosis during their rest period, the researchers thought that
4:50
studying MCL-1 might reveal more about what exactly is going on during those rest cycles.
4:56
So, they did a classic scientist thing: to figure out what a protein does,
5:00
get yourself some mice and make that protein go away!
5:03
The researchers removed the MCL-1 gene in the skin of some mice from birth,
5:07
and without MCL-1 to keep apoptosis at bay, there was too much cell death.
5:11
The mice were born with hair follicles, but they eventually lost their hair follicle stem cells.
5:16
In another group of mice, the researchers suddenly switched the gene off when they were
5:20
55 days old and shaved a patch of hair from their mouse backs to see what would happen.
5:24
The control mice who still had working MCL-1 regrew their shaved hair, but the
5:29
ones without MCL-1 didn’t, and eventually lost all of their hair follicles by day 90.
5:34
The role of MCL-1 in preventing apoptosis seems to stop the follicle stem cells from dying.
5:40
And it seems to be involved with more critical pathways than just hair growth.
5:44
It interacts with a bunch of other important regulators that control the cell’s life cycle.
5:49
Most notably, p53.
5:51
P53 is famous for its job as an anti-cancer regulator in your body.
5:55
This protein protects you from cancer by controlling genes that boost apoptosis,
5:59
which sends potentially problematic cells to their death.
6:03
p53 is basically like, “Damaged DNA?
6:06
Cellular stress?
6:07
Not under my watch!” and boots those cells out.
6:10
Or at least that’s how it happens in my fanfiction, Christopher Nolan hit me up.
6:13
Among the many hats it wears, p53 opposes the function of MCL-1.
6:18
p53 promotes apoptosis, MCL-1 suppresses it.
6:22
And under normal circumstances,
6:24
those two proteins work together to keep hair growth under good control.
6:27
It’s like the batman and the joker, it makes sense,
6:30
Christopher Nolan I know you’re watching, my phone number is—
6:35
The researchers found that hair follicle stem
6:37
cells get stressed if they're dividing fast, which signals p53 to switch on.
6:42
So, to find out what exactly p53 is doing here: it’s time for more gene eliminations!
6:47
This time, the scientists removed both the p53 gene and MCL-1.
6:52
And the mice without either p53 or MCL-1 ended up with hair!
6:57
Even though not having MCL-1 should have basically resulted in too much cell death and no hair,
7:02
removing the p53-coding gene rescued the mice's hairdos.
7:06
This showed that p53 and MCL-1 hold each other in check,
7:10
and you need both in the right amounts to keep hair growth under control.
7:14
As with almost anything in biology, balance is the name of the game.
7:18
Now, even though we have found some of the key proteins involved in hair loss,
7:22
translating that knowledge into treatments will still take a lot more research.
7:26
We’d need to find a way to increase the activity of MCL-1 somehow,
7:30
and this research doesn’t provide a way to do that yet.
7:32
And by the way, switching off p53 entirely instead is out of the question.
7:37
“We cured your baldness, but gave you cancer!” is a complete non-starter.
7:42
But finding evidence for the role of MCL-1 in apoptosis,
7:46
especially in stem cells, is a super important step in learning about cancer.
7:50
Some people are interested in targeting MCL-1 for
7:53
cancer treatments, if we can figure out how to carefully finetune its activity.
7:57
Knowing how MCL-1 impacts stem cells is also exciting for studying tissue regeneration.
8:02
Since stem cells can turn into a bunch of different cells, finding a protein that can
8:07
control them could mean being able to tweak which tissues are growing when.
8:11
Even if we haven’t found a cure for baldness yet, in the process of learning about hair loss,
8:16
we have found another pathway that the body uses to control cell growth and cancer.
8:21
And that could lead to potential breakthroughs that go way beyond the top of your head.
8:26
So bald mice and bald men, hold your heads high, knowing that hair loss
8:30
research has taken us another step closer to understanding cancer, and baldness too!
8:37
[♪ OUTRO]
