Researchers at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons have discovered the first human gene associated with hair loss. The new gene, called hairless, is linked to a severe form of inherited baldness and may be the trigger that turns on the entire human hair cycle. The discovery could lead to a better understanding of the hair cycle and, eventually, more effective treatments for various forms of hair loss.

Everyone has bad hair days. For 30 million men in the United States, roughly 40 percent of those over 35, every day is a no hair day. The good news is that thanks to new research, baldness may be fading away. Researchers from the Howard Hughes Institute at the University of Chicago have induced hair follicle formation in the mature skin cells of mice.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have been able to grow hair faster and thicker on mice thanks to a protein that promotes blood vessel growth in their skin. The mouse hair follicles – while no greater in number than those of normal mice – are individually bigger. Collectively, they increase the total volume of hair by 70 percent.

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have identified a key factor in the cause of alopecia areata, a hair loss disorder that often strikes children. Their study, to appear in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology (December 2001), suggests that future treatments could involve desensitizing the body’s immune system to the substances that provoke the attack.

Two women with Parkinson's disease who developed alopecia (baldness) while being treated with the dopamine agonists pramipexole or ropinirole found that the hair loss stopped after the drugs were discontinued and replaced with a new treatment. The study is published in the current issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Inactivating just one of more than two dozen similar genes can cause temporary but profound hair loss, known as alopecia, in mice, researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Pasteur Institute in France report in the June issue of Genes & Development.

University of Michigan graduate student David Van Mater knew something strange was going on when he noticed stubble on the shaved skin of experimental mice in his laboratory. Instead of the tumors he had originally expected to see, the mice were growing hair.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have isolated stem cells responsible for hair follicle growth. The findings, published in the April issue of Nature Biotechnology, may serve as the foundation for new hair loss and skin grafting treatments.

A progressive skin disease causing hair loss in adult humans was identified in laboratory mice, providing a genetic tool to study the disease known as alopecia areata (AA).

Scientists from the universities of Bonn and Düsseldorf , Germany, have shown that specific changes in the genetic ‘construction manual’ of the androgen receptor may result in premature balding. The affected gene lies on the x chromosome; men inherit the defect therefore from their mother — supporting the widespread assumption that as far as hair loss is concerned men take after their maternal grandfather rather than their father.