The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson,

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

Hair loss, looking beyond genetics.

Conventional wisdom teaches us to accept our fate when it comes to hair loss, looking beyond genetics. Conventional wisdom teaches us to accept our fate when it comes to hair loss. Runs in the family, we're often told, and sometimes it does. But that's usually not

the full story. It's just part of getting older, people say as well. And there we again find only partial

truth at best. But the primal path is one of thoughtful scrutiny, not blind acceptance.

While most people would file hair loss under aesthetic concerns, ranging from neutral to negative

depending on social norms and personal views, it's not always that

innocuous. Let's look today at the bigger picture behind hair loss and the situations in which it

signifies a genuine health concern. Hair loss, genetic destiny? To those in the know,

androgenetic alopecia, AA, is the number one form of progressive

hair loss. The term can be a little misleading. It also encompasses a condition called female

pattern baldness. The andro derives from dihydrotestosterone, the so-called male hormone that specialists believe to be the

primary cause of AA. It's estimated that half of men over the age of 50 and half of women

over the age of 65 have this form of hair loss, and the young people can be affected as well.

The theory goes that every hair follicle on your scalp is genetically predisposed to either

be susceptible or resistant to increasing levels of dihydrotestosterone as you age.

Those whose hair follicles are sensitive to this hormone will see a steady decline

in hair as they age, while those who dodged the genetic

bullet can retain their hair into their later decades, provided they don't succumb to any number

of the other hair loss factors.

The theory implicating testosterone developed back in the 1940s when James B. Hamilton reported

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