Baldness tied to increased prostate cancer risk: study

Baldness is associated with an increased risk of prostate cancer, according to a new study of African-American men.
US researchers found that among African-American men baldness was associated with a 69 per cent increased risk of prostate cancer.
"Early-onset baldness may be a risk factor for early-onset prostate cancer in African-American men, particularly younger men," said Charnita Zeigler-Johnson, research assistant professor at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
In particular, those with frontal baldness, and not vertex baldness, were more than twice as likely to have been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer, according to the study published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

This association was even stronger among men who were diagnosed when younger than 60, with a sixfold increase in high-stage prostate cancer and a fourfold increase in high-grade prostate cancer.
In addition, among younger men with prostate cancer, those with frontal baldness were more likely to have a high prostate-specific antigen level at diagnosis.

The research examined 318 men with prostate cancer and 219 controls who enrolled in the Study of Clinical Outcomes, Risk and Ethnicity (SCORE) between 1998 and 2010.
"We focused on African-American men because they are at high risk for developing prostate cancer and are more than twice as likely to die from prostate cancer than other groups in the United States," Zeigler-Johnson said.

"Although this is a high-risk group for poor prostate cancer outcomes, no published study had focused on evaluating baldness as a potential risk factor in a sample of African-American men," Zeigler-Johnson said.