From: Doug Skrecky (oberon@vcn.bc.ca)
Date: Mon Mar 29 1999 - 18:30:24 MST
From: thread@servtech.com
Newsgroups: alt.baldspot
Here is the original article on mites and baldnes that appeared in the press:
Mite implicated in all baldness cases
By GLENN GARELIK UPI Science News
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 (UPI) _ In the second report in as many days
announcing a factor contributing to baldness, a dermatologist
reports that a common mite is implicated in all cases of human hair
loss.
Dr. William Regelson, an expert with the Medical College of Virginia,
told an annual meeting of dermatologists in Miami that while the
mite has been known since the 1840s to cause mange in animals, until now
no one had noticed that the minute organism is invariably
present in the hair follicles of human beings who are losing their hair.
Called Demodex follicularum, as many as a dozen of the mites burrow
head-down in every hair follicle of the person affected. There
they live on sebum, the oily material the scalp secretes.
The first uninvited guests arrive during a person's adolescence,
Regelson told United Press International, and by late middle age all
people harbor them. The difference between people who eventually lose
their hair and those who do not, however, likely depends on
whether the scalp produces an inflammatory reaction in an attempt to
reject the mite, he speculates.
Whether or not that reaction occurs, in turn, may depend on a gene that
codes for it, he says. The gene in question, Regelson says, is
very possibly the ``hairless gene'' announced Thursday by doctors at
Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in
New York as the first human gene linked to baldness.
The mite was discovered in human hair by a researcher at Nioxin, a major
hair-care and cosmetics developer based in Lithium
Springs, Ga. This was accomplished thanks to a newly available hand-held
microscope that can magnify live scalp up 1,000 times.
Scientists at the company are now working on a technique to control the
mites by developing a chemical that would interrupt their
capacity to digest the oils in sebum.
_- Copyright 1998 United Press International All rights reserved _-
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