The game of “Am I Losing My Hair?” that you play in the mirror when you start hitting middle age full-force can be a depressing and simultaneously sobering affair. No man (or woman) wants to start going bald.
But here’s the reality: Two-thirds of all dudes will have started the dreaded process by the time we are 35. And by age 70, about 60% will be well on their way to chrome-dome-dom.
So curious researchers (probably mostly bald) from the University of Edinburgh in the U.K. recently set up a study on genetics to find out if they could predict which guys would get severe hair loss. They looked at the health info and genomic data from more than 52,000 men. Next, they located 287 genetic “regions”—sections of their DNA—that are related to hair structure and growth, and then tried to create a formula that could predict the chance of someone developing male pattern baldness.
