There’s an old wives’ tale that says bald men are more virile than those with a full head of hair.  Now the wisdom of old wives has been given the ‘evidence-based’ treatment by researchers from Melbourne University.

Since the time of Hippocrates it has been known that eunuchs do not lose their hair, and this was underlined in a 1940s study of US sex offenders who had been castrated – they did not go bald.

Subsequent research demonstrated that the key hormonal driver of male baldness is testosterone, which is also responsible for masculinity, virility, libido and possibly aggression. This link led to an assumption that baldness is a sign of virility. But now dermatology Professor Rodney Sinclair and his colleagues from Melbourne University have tested the hypothesis and laid it to rest.

They did this by re-examining data from a study originally designed to test risk factors for prostate cancer. The results are published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

The original study authors recruited 2,836 men with prostate cancer from cancer registers and unaffected controls from electoral registers.

All subjects were interviewed in person and were categorised into four patterns of baldness – nil, receding only, vertex (back of the head) only and fully bald – by the interviewer. These balding patterns broadly capture the different types of male pattern hair loss in Australia.

At the end of the interview, the subjects were given privacy to complete a questionnaire that elicited not only their history of ejaculations obtained by any means between the ages of 20 and 49 but also their number of sexual partners.

The authors found no significant association between baldness (either limited to vertex balding at the crown or being fully bald) and the frequency of ejaculations between age 20 and 49 years. But bald men were significantly less likely to have had more than four female sexual partners.

So, the bad news for bald men is that they are to be no more virile than their well-thatched contemporaries; to the contrary, they seem to have fewer lovers.

While testosterone does cause baldness, the difference between bald men and non-bald men is not how much testosterone they produce, but rather it relates to how the testosterone signal is received in the hair follicle.

The original article by Professor Sinclair appeared on The Conversation website.

Tags: Baldness