Bald again

First published in Column 8 on the 3^rd March, 1993

I’ve written previously about studies done in the United States on bald and bearded men, and the speculative and contradictory conclusions that were reached.

Bald men were supposed to have ‘evolved’ their baldness to impress the fair sex. Apparently that wasn’t such a good idea. A new study (published in all seriousness, one assumes, in the Journal of the American Medical Association), says that totally bald men are three times more likely to die of a heart attack than those with a full head of hair.

Significantly, the study was funded by a company which makes a treatment for baldness.

Only men with vertex (see below) baldness are seriously at risk. Men who are partially bald can relax a little, and fellers like me, whose hair is receding at a pace only marginally faster than Australia is heading towards Singapore, are not even in the running for a heart attack. (Well, not as a result of hair loss anyway – a fatality might occur if my wife went ‘ boo!’ in the night.)

Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) writes that he now keeps his massive Chambers dictionary on his desktop not only to check out words he can’t spell, but as a way of discovering new words. I find reports of medical studies are just as effective: new words are always cropping up in them.

I had to drag my dictionary down from the shelf to look up ‘vertex.’ In maths, it means the point opposite the base of a figure. I suppose that’s appropriate for its use here. The word comes from the Latin word for whirlpool (as does ‘vortex’), but that hardly befits someone bald. Vertex whirlpool hair-swirling cannot be seen on a bald head.

Would you believe that there had been either other studies done on baldness and heart attacks before this latest one? The obsession with coronary baldness is remarkable. Not being bald, I’d think there were rather more pressing problems for scientists to get their teeth into. (Getting their teeth into baldness, anyway, could be painful.)

However, these previous studies very sensibly concluded that smoking and hypertension were likelier culprits in coronary disease. You’d think that would satisfy. Quite frankly, bandying medical terminology about doesn’t convince me of the bald heart attack syndrome. But it is very poetic: metabolic by-product of testosterone, and artery-clogging cholesterol. I love it!

As usual with these studies there are obstinate bald men who are the exceptions, refusing to die of anything but what they intend to die of. My father, who was well into baldness, died of cancer. His bald brother, who at 88 is still going strong, suffers only from a little short-term memory loss.

And it’s a probability (though not a mathematical one) that sometime soon the results of a study done on hairy-headed, -chinned, or -chested men will ‘prove’ they are more like to die of gangrene than the fortunate bald.

I wish that hairy man, Albert Einstein, had done a little tangent work on his balding relatives when he was into relativity. Then we might have had a genuine solution to the coronary problem years ago, instead of waiting till now for nine studies of depilatory (bald-faced?) speculation.

Least anyone out there thinks I’m being baldist in my remarks, let me encourage them. There’s one positive thing about being bald. As the old proverb says: Bald heads are soon shaven. (And cheap to keep that way, I’d guess.

My uncle Reg playing chess with me in Queenstown where we went
for a holiday when he and his second wife came for a visit. 

Re-reading this piece again in 2026 reminds me that I have had a heart attack. Last year, in March. Hmm.

My uncle, mentioned above, died just a little under a year after this was written. He increasingly suffered from Alzheimer’s (not just memory loss, it turned out) and his last year or two involved some painful episodes for his wife. He appears occasionally in one of my other blogs: https://hannaganfamily.blogspot.com/ - search for Reg (Crowl).