I first noticed I was losing my hair when I was 18.
“Ah, don’t worry about it,” my father said. “You’re still a good-looking kid.”
He had his hair, so the possibility that I could lose mine never occurred to me. I stared in the mirror in disbelief. “If you worry about it, it’ll only get worse,” my mother cautioned. “It’s not worth having a heart attack over.” Heart conditions and hypertension were big in her family, so this was something I could anticipate. As a mother, she always treated matters of the heart with concern and tenderness.
Now, 16 years later, researchers in a large-scale study say there is indeed a link between hair loss and heart disease. A paper just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine says that, depending on where and how much hair a man is losing, combined with other factors, his risk of heart disease can be tremendously higher than that of a man with no hair loss.
Front to back loss (the Jack Nicholson look) puts you at 9 percent greater risk. Mild balding on the crown pushes you up to 23 percent and more serious follicular bereavement to 32 percent. Assuming no hypertension, being John Malkovich makes you 36 percent more prone to heart disease. With hypertension, that figure climbs to 79 percent. With high cholesterol, it soars to 178 percent and eating right, exercise and an otherwise dull lifestyle won’t necessarily save you.
The National Institutes of Health-funded study followed 22,071 physicians between the ages of 40 and 84 for 11 years. The researchers say the statistics may not be relevant to men of color, since 92.1 percent of the subjects were white, which may add fuel to the angry white male phenomenon.
Of the men who died before the study could be completed, about a third succumbed to heart-related ailments.
People have always regarded baldness as an affliction. Late-night infomercials pitch miraculous hair-growing potions while playing on the assumption that hairless heads are less attractive to women and less likely to get jobs.
Even the drug and medical communities, whose financial motives are more than just cosmetic, use the same lingo, with talk of “severity,” “treatments” and “cures,” as if it’s fatal–which it turns out it may be.
Yet, interestingly, the study focuses on doctors, who are as a class intelligent, driven and successful. (They drive good cars, which raises the question of whether a Hot Wheels cancels the hair problem.)
How much does that intelligence and drive contribute to baldness or heart conditions? Is the testosterone, which researchers think may cause both problems, the gas in their tank or the dangerous sediment of ambition? We’ll have to wait for a study on real losers to penetrate those questions.
My sense, though, is that testosterone has nothing to do with it. Bald men get heart disease because they’re losing their hair. And it’s not even necessarily that they’re damned by their own vanity, feelings of lost youth or fear of rejection. Because, believe me, long after a bald guy sheds the issue, other people oddly enough, usually other men –keep bringing it up.
They make jokes or worse, they offer advice, like a clipping with information on some product like Propecia. “They’re doing amazing things these days with lasers,” someone told me.
The first time we met, my wife’s cousin said, “Hmm, you’re better looking in person. You have more hair than in the picture.”
Because he lives overseas, we see each other only periodically, and he always greets me with an update on my hairline: “Hmm, not too bad.” Or, “Oooh, lost a little since the last time.”
Every so often, I want to come back with something like, “I think that honker you call a nose needs some fixing. I swear it’s growing.” Which, I swear, it is.
But there are rules in everything in life, and the rule in society about hair loss is that, because it’s funny to other people, the Bald and the Balding are supposed to be good-natured about it. Honestly, it’s enough to give you a heart condition.
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Todd Pitock is still losing his hair in Bryn Mawr, Pa.
