Pluck hair to cure baldness

New research suggests that selectively plucking hair in very close proximity can stimulate some startlingly dense regrowth. The team behind the study, led by researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) in the US, demonstrated that by carefully extracting 200 strands of hairs, one-by-one, from the back of a mouse in a specific configuration and density, they could trigger the growth of around 1,200 new hair strands in the area — a five-fold increase.

The researchers say their findings, which were reported in the journal Cell, could pave the way for new treatments for balding, or alopecia. Previous studies have shown that nearly 50 per cent of men between the ages of 40 and 49 might experience some form of balding. While male pattern balding, known as androgenic alopecia, is estimated to affect about 6.5 million men in the UK, and more than 35 million men in the US.

So how does one plucked hair prompt five new ones to sprout up? It almost sounds too good to be true. Well, researchers say that the trauma caused by hair being plucked triggers an immune response, as the skin follicle sends out a kind of distress signal via the release of inflammatory proteins.

This causes immune cells to rush to the site of the injury. As the researchers explain, these immune cells secrete a molecule in response and this signals to the plucked follicle, and other skin follicles in the vicinity, that it’s time to grow new hair. “We made a discovery about how hair communicates when it’s distressed,” Phillip Murray, a mathematician at the University of Dundee in the UK, who co-authored the paper, told Hannah Devlin at

The Guardian.

Interestingly, the regeneration is very dependent on the pattern of the pluck. When the team pulled 200 strands from an area on the mouse’s back exceeding a 6 mm-wide diameter, they didn't observe any regrowth at all.

But when they repeated the process, plucking individual strands in circular areas between 3 and 5 mm, they saw some big returns, with between 450 and 1,300 new strands emerging. In some cases, these new strands even grew outside the plucked region. If the follicles are too far apart, they can’t signal collectively. But if the plucking is closely packed together, the follicles can work together, stimulating new hair growth.