[stormbrew]

I believe there have been studies where they've transplanted hair from and to different parts of the body and found that they largely continue to grow the way they did at their original site, implying that follicles from different parts of the body just respond to hormonal environment differently.

Also the current understanding is that it's specifically DHT (a second order type of testosterone) that causes head hair follicles, and hormone treatments that modulate conversion of T into DHT one way or the other have fairly predictable effects on hair loss patterns.

There probably isn't just one single cause here, but hormones are definitely a big part of it.

[jjoonathan]

You're underselling modern medicine and giving rubicon33 way too much credit. This isn't merely academic, it isn't merely correlations, it isn't speculative, and it isn't a mess of competing explanations. Hair transplants are a common and reliable intervention for male pattern baldness.

If MPB were due to a tension mechanism, transplants wouldn't work. But they do. If MPB were due to a tension mechanism, surgical intervention would be simpler than transplanting thousands of follicles. But it isn't. If MPB is due to an endocrine mechanism, which it is, transplanted hair would behave differently than adjacent "native" hair against the progression of balding. It does.

Billions of transplanted follicles on millions of balding heads testify to the fact that rubicon33 is way off base.

[stormbrew]

I really don't know what in my post made you feel like I was giving the GP any credit at all. This is a weirdly combative reply for a vehement agreement?

[voldacar]

To me it's probably a combination of stress from dht exposure and mechanical stress that causes thinning and baldness once the total stress level around the follicle surpasses some threshold. You can't just dismiss mechanical stress that easily, it would be an insane coincidence for scalp tightness to correlate so closely with dht sensitivity in the absence of any causality.

[ShredKazoo]

Aren't hair transplants almost always administered alongside DHT blocking drugs?

[thoraweigh]

Yes, because transplanted hair is DHT resistant, not DHT immune.