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Male-pattern hair growth in women without hormonal problems responds to drug treatment. Aldactone, a testosterone inhibitor, is best, a comparison study suggests.

Depending on ethnicity, as many as one in 10 women has hirsutism — male-pattern hair growth. Most of the time, this means a woman has a hormonal imbalance. But one in five hirsute women have normal hormone function. Doctors call this idiopathic hirsutism. Can drugs used to treat the more common forms of the problem work for these women?

The answer is yes, says a report in the April issue of the journal Fertility and Sterility. Franco Lumach, MD, and Riccardo Rondinone, MD, of the University of Padua, Italy, compared three different drug treatments:

* Aldactone, a diuretic and testosterone inhibitor
* Propecia, a male hair-growth drug that blocks testosterone
* Cyproterone acetate, a male-hormone blocker used in oral contraceptives. This drug is not available in the U.S.

Lumach and Rondinone randomly treated 41 women — all with idiopathic hirsutism — with one of the three drugs for 12 months. They examined them after six and 12 months of treatment, and again one year after completing treatment.

At the end of treatment, all of the drugs had significant effects. They dropped the women’s hirsutism score from abnormal to normal. But a year later, Aldactone was the clear winner.

“In patients with idiopathic hirsutism, the short-term results of treatment with [the three drugs] are similar, but [Aldactone] is effective for a longer time,” they conclude.

Aldactone had another advantage: It’s less expensive than the other two drugs.

The drug Proscar helps prevent prostate cancer and could lengthen the lives of many men, researchers say.

This is true even though the drug appears to increase the likelihood that some men will get more advanced prostate cancer, they say. Prostate cancer is the most common type of cancer for U.S. men after skin cancer, says the American Cancer Society (ACS). The ACS estimates that one in six men will develop prostate cancer. However, many fewer men — one in 33 — will die of prostate cancer, and prostate cancer death rates are dropping, says the ACS.
Lifesaving Effects

Prostate cancer grows in response to the male hormone testosterone. Proscar inhibits testosterone. It has already been approved by the FDA to treat men with enlarged prostates. It’s also sold under the name Propecia to treat male pattern baldness.

The drug entered the spotlight in the recent Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial, where it cut prostate cancer prevalence by nearly 25%. The trial’s results were so strong that the study of almost 19,000 men was stopped a year early.

But the news wasn’t all rosy. The testosterone-lowering drug was linked to a greater incidence of advanced prostate cancer. Of men diagnosed with prostate cancer, nearly 12% of those taking Proscar had advanced prostate cancer, compared with 5% who took a placebo.

Was Proscar worth it for men to take on a large scale? Yes, says the new study, which appears in the April 1 edition of the journal Cancer.

The researchers crunched the numbers from the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial, applying them to all men aged 55 or older from 1993 to 1997. They calculated Proscar’s lifesaving potential.

If every man in the U.S. age 55 or older took Proscar, more than 316,000 person-years would be saved in a decade, the researchers estimate. For example, more than 316,000 men would live a year longer than without the drug.

Even if advanced cancers increased by about 7%, Proscar would still allow more than 262,000 men to live a year longer, write Joseph Unger, MS, and colleagues. Unger works at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Proscar’s potential shouldn’t be overlooked out of fear, the study suggests. The researchers point out again that prostate cancer would be prevented in 25% of men that take Proscar.

Hair follicles that are lost may not be gone forever.

For the first time, scientists have identified cells in mice that are capable of regenerating new hair follicles when transplanted into the skin. The finding is likely to spur research into new hair loss treatments for humans.

Although researchers have suspected that hair follicles contained stem cells (which are potent cells that can be coaxed into developing into multiple types of tissue), their existence had not been conclusively proven until now.

In the study, researchers used new cell labeling techniques to isolate the stem cells from hair follicles in mice and then showed that they developed into mature hair cells capable of producing follicles and hair growth.

“Ultimately, these findings provide potential targets for the treatment of hair loss and other disorders of the skin and hair,” write research Rebecca J. Morris of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and colleagues.
Discovery Paves the Way for New Hair Loss Treatments

In the study, which appears in the April issue of Nature Biotechnology, researchers mixed the stem cells of follicles with skin cells and transplanted the cells into the skin of laboratory mice.

Once transplanted, the stem cells spontaneously grew into hair follicles that produced hair in the mice.

Researchers say they also identified a set of genes that are “turned on” by the stem cells, which may provide new targets for manipulating hair growth.

“Our results provide new avenues for increasing our understanding of epithelial stem cell biology and hair follicle growth and disease,” conclude the researchers.

Currently, there are only two FDA-approved treatments for hair loss, Rogaine and Propecia.