Does Being Bald Protect You From Cancer?
As a bald man, I live in hope
There are obvious cons to being bald. As someone who started losing their hair in his 20s, I can tell you that I definitely miss hair sometimes. I occasionally regret not dyeing my hair just to see what it would look like. You can always get a wig, but it’s just not the same as having your own hair.
But there are also pros. For one thing, I don’t spend money on hair cuts any more. I just shave it with a razor in the shower—quick, easy, and simple. No fancy shampoo or conditioner needed, I just wash with shower soap. It makes my life at least 5 minutes easier each day, probably more.
And, according to new research, it might be improving my health. As the New York Post is reporting, there appears to be a “surprising health benefit of being bald”. Apparently, being bald can reduce your risk of cancer.
The reality is, of course, a bit hairier than that. The truth is that going bald may be a signal of cancer risk, but it is very unlikely to improve your health. Let’s look at the data.
Bare Naked Truth
The newest study to hit the headlines is a case-control investigation looking at men with and without prostate cancer. This is a type of research where you identify people based on whether they have the disease you’re investigating, and it’s commonly used to try and identify things that may raise your risk of relatively uncommon conditions. For example, the issues posed by asbestos were primarily identified through exactly this sort of study.
In this case, the authors looked 1,001 men diagnosed with prostate cancer and compared them to a group of similar controls. They asked these men whether they had lost hair when they were 30, and 1 year before their inclusion in the study. They then ran a series of statistical models looking at whether reported hair loss was associated with prostate cancer risk—essentially, whether men who had prostate cancer were more or less likely to say that they had hair loss at 30 or have no hair when diagnosed than men the same age.
After correcting for a range of factors that can cause both baldness and cancer, such as age and family history, the authors found that men who said they were losing their hair at 30 were less likely to get cancer. However, hair loss at the time of cancer diagnosis was not associated with prostate cancer in any of the models.
This is obviously inconsistent. If hair loss is related to prostate cancer, then it should be related to the disease regardless of which age it happens at. Also, the age 30 variable is by far the weaker one—most of the men in the study were over age 60. This creates a very big risk of recall bias. This is exactly what it sounds like—people get worse at remembering stuff the longer it has been since it happened. It is unlikely that the average 60-year-old could remember the exact time that they started to lose their hair, which means that the estimate of hair loss at age 30 is pretty murky.
It’s also not an especially robust study. It’s not tiny, but it’s not huge, and the authors didn’t have a great deal of information on the men in the dataset. There are all sorts of potential biases that they simply couldn’t control for in this analysis.
Hair Loss and Cancer
This brings us to the evidence-base more generally. This is hardly the first time that anyone has looked into whether hair loss might be connected to prostate cancer. There’s actually a fairly plausible biological connection, since both male baldness and prostate cancer are influenced by hormone levels, and therefore they could very well be connected to some extent.
Unfortunately, the evidence does not really support an association between the two. The biggest study I could find on the topic which enrolled men in their 70s and asked them to remember whether they were bald at age 45 did not find an association between balding and prostate cancer. A large prospective trial from the US where men had their baldness assessed in 1971-4 by a dermatologist and were then followed up in 1992 found an increased risk of cancer in men who were going bald. A systematic review from 2018 including 15 studies in total did not find any association overall.
In other words, while this new study adds a little bit to our knowledge-base, the reality is that we have not seen a consistent association between baldness and cancer. It’s possible that there is an association that we haven’t discovered yet, but given the current studies I’ve seen published I don’t think it’s very likely.
Also, none of these studies claim to show that baldness protects against cancer. The entire concept is that hormones may influence both cancer risk and hair loss, not that losing your locks somehow prevents cancer cells from forming in your body.
Baldness doesn’t prevent cancer. We all knew that, I think. Perhaps more interestingly, despite the recent headlines it doesn’t seem to be associated with prostate cancer either.