Male Pattern Baldness

Many people would have heard this term 'Male Pattern Baldness' before, however not all people realise quite what it means or what it is associated with in terms of losing hair.

Male Pattern Baldness can be described as a process in which the pattern of hair growth phases in males, changes over time with age. We all know by now that hair can be in either a growth phase or a renewal phase.

MPB symptoms include patchy hair growth, bald spots, baldness, thin hair around the crown and the traditional 'M' pattern of receding hair at the hairline and temples.

MPB results when hair follicales no longer go from telegen phase (dormant) to androgen phase (regrowth). This does not often happen cycle to cycle, and tends to occur gradully, with each hair growing back weaker and weaker till they are almost unnoticable.

This is why MPB is a gradual process. MPB is not to be associated with the changes in hairline growth that tends to happen when males move from pubescent to adult; this change in hairline tends to go from a straight format to the traditional 'widow peaked' format that adult males exhibit.

Males who experience this often wonder wether this can be a pre-cursor to baldness, and in most cases it will be many years until hair thins noticible to warrant worry about hair loss.

MPB is given its name from the way in which it tends to associate itself with hair loss in areas that follow a typical 'pattern' accross subjects. This tends to be either; starting at the crown, and forming a growing circle of baldness toward the top of the head or; starting at the hairline and forming a thinning area that recedes toward the top of the head and the crown.

It is interesting to note that MPB does not tend to affect the sides or back of hair, where hair accross all humans tends to be genetically resistant to follicle damage and death.

Male pattern baldness is triggered by many processes within the body. It is a common myth that MPB is inherited from the mothers side of the family, this is untrue, as a bald or full headed man can inherit genes from either parent.

It is common place to see an older full-headed father and a son who experiences MPB or thin hair, or the other way round, where the son is full headed and the father balds at a young age. In this way, MPB is known to skip generations and in other cases, be prominant with all males in a family.

There is even cases where twin brothers experience MPB or thinning, at entirely different times of life, when DNA makeup is very very similar.

Other triggers of MPB can range from excess testosterone production, to diet changes, to trauma of the scalp. Technically, these triggers are a form of alopecia, and MPB tends to occur as a seperate process to this, however, with less resistance to growth when these alopecia triggers occur, MPB becomes more noticable and harder to disguise and will set in apparantly faster.

In this way, we can conclude that MPB is quite largely miss-understood, and although alot of research is conducted around the subject, no one has all the answers to the subject of MPB.

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All the best,

Janse Willems.