Too Much of a Good Thing, Part 1: Testosterone, Prostate Cancer, and Baldness

Men whose hairlines have drastically receded early in life have a significantly higher risk of developing prostate cancer later on. But before you jump to any conclusions, understand that this is one of those causation-vs.-correlation things. In other words, baldness doesn’t cause prostate cancer and prostate cancer doesn’t cause baldness. But it appears that the same thing that causes the growth of cancerous cells may also inhibit hair growth. The culprit? testosterone.

Researchers in Australia studied almost 10,000 men who were between 40 and 69 when the project began in the 1990s. They found that men who’d lost a good portion of their hair before age 40 were more likely to develop “early-onset” tumors, often as young as 50 or 60. Those less-harry men were also more likely to suffer from BPH (benign prostatic hyperplasia—a non-cancerous enlargement of the prostate) at younger ages than their bushier brothers. One of the major symptoms of BPH is trouble emptying the bladder or starting the flow.
The results were published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.