Smoking Might Cause Baldness

By now everyone – even the execs at Philip Morris – knows about the links between smoking and lung disease. But did you know about the links between smoking and hair loss?

Let me throw some medical mumbo jumbo at you from PubMed.gov. This is an editorial piece written in 2003.

Besides being the single most preventable cause of significant morbidity and an important cause of death in the general population, tobacco smoking has been associated with adverse effects on the skin. Smoke-induced premature skin ageing has attracted the attention of the medical community, while only recently an observational study has indicated a significant relationship between smoking and baldness. The mechanisms by which smoking causes hair loss are multifactorial….

It goes on to list a number of those factors, including damage to the DNA of the hair follicle. Genetic damage! That’s the most fundamental level of life.

Now, I know what the skeptics are saying. “Observational study.” Please where the hard evidence?

I’m glad you asked.

This abstract is from a 2000 study done on Italian mice (OK, the mice might not have been Italian; they might have been immigrants.):

Smoke genotoxicants are metabolized in hair follicle cells, where they form DNA adducts and cause DNA damage. The suspicion was raised that, in humans, a link may exist between smoking and both premature grey hair and hair loss. In order to check this hypothesis, we carried out a study in C57BL/6 mice exposed whole-body to a mixture of sidestream and mainstream cigarette smoke. After 3 months exposure, most mice developed areas of alopecia and grey hair, while no such lesions occurred either in sham-exposed mice or in smoke-exposed mice receiving the chemopreventive agent N-acetylcysteine with drinking water. Cell apoptosis occurred massively in the hair bulbs at the edge of alopecia areas. Smoke-exposed mice had extensive atrophy of the epidermis, reduced thickness of the subcutaneous tissue, and scarcity of hair follicles.

Want a little more? Here’s another Italian study on mice. (This one done in 2001.) Researchers were testing for lung tumor yield by exposing mice to cigarette smoke. It sounds like they had mediocre success in the primary goal of the study. They did, however, have great success in causing the mice to go bald.