Early Baldness Tied to Increased Risk of Prostate Cancer in African Americans

A team of researchers from the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia has new evidence regarding baldness in African American men.

According to the latest finding, baldness is linked with an increased risk of prostate cancer among African American men.  In addition to this, the risk for prostate cancer increases with early onset of baldness and the way one loses hair.

"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," Charnita Zeigler-Johnson, Ph.D., research assistant professor at the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said in a press statement.

The study was conducted on 318 men with prostate cancer and a control group of 219 men. All the participants were African-American with varying degrees of baldeness and had enrolled in the Study of Clinical Outcomes, Risk and Ethnicity between 1998-2010. With the help of a questionnaire, the researchers gathered data on the kind of baldness( frontal, vertex or none) along with other medical history.

They discovered that baldness was related to 69 percent increased risk of prostate cancer. African-American men with frontal baldness were twice more likely to suffer from advanced prostate cancer.

This association was stronger among men who were diagnosed when younger than 60, with a six-fold increase in high-stage prostate cancer and a four-fold increase in high-grade prostate cancer, according to the study published in the journal of the American Association for Cancer Research 'Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention'.