If you’re becoming alarmed by the increasing amounts of hair clogging up the plughole following a shower, you may want to use a new online baldness calculator to help you discover how long it’s going to be before the ol’ bowling ball will be requiring a dollop of sun cream.
All you need to do is answer a series of questions and let the calculator do the rest. If you dare, you can also upload a picture of yourself and see how you might look with a shiny top.
To determine if and when hair loss might occur, and at what speed, the calculator asks a series of questions such as:
- How strongly has your hair loss progressed?
- Do you have dandruff?
- Are you frequently under stress?
- Are there men with hair loss in your family?
The new calculator, picked up by Sky News, is the work of Dr Adolf Klenk, a German hair loss specialist associated with the Alpecin research institute.
Speaking to the news organization, a spokesman for Alpecin, Rick Guttridge, said of baldness, “It’s not a disease so there isn’t a cure. But what you can do is treat the condition, with medications to boost your hair.”
Guttridge highlighted the fact that a person’s testosterone levels play a big part in baldness, explaining, “What we have discovered is testosterone has a negative effect on hair loss….the testosterone makes the energy in each hair follicle run out sooner so the more testosterone a person has, the sooner they will burn out of their energy and the hair will drop out sooner.”
According to Guttridge, the effects of testosterone can be controlled with caffeine. But before you head off to the supermarket to buy up all the coffee, it’s clear that gulping down gallons of the stuff will do you more harm than good. “The amount you would need to drink to stimulate follicle growth would be toxic to your system,” Guttridge said.
The bottom line is, if your parents or grandparents suffered from hair loss, you’re likely to become follicly challenged at some point too. Stress is also another factor. Wearing a hat doesn’t help either.
For those of you interested in using the calculator to determine what the website calls “your personal baldness risk,” click here.
