The Fugue

Coincidentally, less than an hour after I cut my hair to one inch all around because of androgenic alopecia, a link to this article came up in my feed reader this morning. Apparently they have found the genetics that cause it. As I understand the article, there are two genetic variants (which they just discovered) on chromosome 20, which when combined with the one they already knew about on the X chromosome (which you get from your mother), increases your chances of going bald sevenfold.

If you have both the risk variants we discovered on chromosome 20 and the unrelated known variant on the X chromosome, your risk of becoming bald increases sevenfold.”

Does this mean you have to get genes from both parents to be bald? What if you don’t have the one on the X chromosome but you get the ones on chromosome 20 from your dad? Well, as you can see this report of the findings isn’t very enlightening, but it does tell us that yes if your mom’s dad and brothers are bald you have increased “risk” (so no, contrary to what you might have read (but probably haven’t), it’s not a myth), but just because your mom’s dad isn’t bald doesn’t mean you might not be.