Day: May 7, 2021

“We think androgens or male hormones are definitely the gateway for the virus to enter our cells. We really think that baldness is a perfect predictor of severity.”

Caution: “So far studies have been of relatively small numbers of patients.”

The above headline within quotation marks was from a Brit tabloid, so you can’t treat it with the solemnity you would accord the Journal of the AMA, but they may actually be onto something, even if they have sensationalized the science to create a paper-selling headline.

The company that discovered the link last spring, Applied Biology, more recently ran a study that tested the use of an androgen inhibitor (Proxalutamide) on COVID patients, and it seems to have been very successful in preventing severe symptoms and the progression of the disease.

As sensational as it seems to propose a correlation between baldness and COVID, the whole concept is actually plausible, given that some element of male biology seems to have consistently made males more vulnerable to the virus in country after country. In the USA, about 236,000 Americans under the age of 75 have died from COVID, consisting of 148,000 men and only 88,000 women. Although that disparity may have behavioral components, it seems that biology must also play a part, and it is reasonable (but not certain) to hypothesize that androgens may be involved, since they are only present in females in limited amounts.

That said, Proxalutamide also showed a fairly high level of gastrointestinal side-effects in the test, although a bit of nausea and diarrhea seems to be a fairly good alternative to death. Once again it must be noted that only about 260 patients were studied in the Applied Biology test, although the results were statistically significant even with so few degrees of freedom.