A community-oriented survey on the association between androgenetic alopecia and metabolic syndrome in Chinese people

Hongliu Zhu; Haijian Guo; Yihong Gao; Yuegang Wei; Tao Mao; Jianqiu Yang

doi:10.3389/fmed.2022.1009578

A community-oriented survey on the association between androgenetic alopecia and metabolic syndrome in Chinese people

Front Med (Lausanne). 2022 Nov 10:9:1009578. doi: 10.3389/fmed.2022.1009578. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Hongliu Zhu¹, Haijian Guo², Yihong Gao¹, Yuegang Wei³, Tao Mao⁴, Jianqiu Yang¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Dermatology, Jiangyin Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Wuxi, China.
² Integrated Business Management Office, Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Nanjing, China.
³ Department of Dermatology, The Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Nanjing, China.
⁴ Department of Health Education, Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Nanjing, China.

Abstract

Background: Several studies on Caucasians have revealed a positive relationship between androgenetic alopecia (AGA) and metabolic syndrome (MS). However, this correlation varies in different contexts. Currently, the association of AGA with MS is yet to be studied and elucidated in Chinese people.

Objective: To evaluate the association between AGA and MS in the Chinese population.

Methods: This study included information on components of MS along with other possible risk factors in a total of 3,703 subjects. The patients' loss of hair was assessed using Hamilton-Norwood and Ludwig classification method.

Results: In this study, 29.88% of male and 27.58% of female AGA patients were diagnosed with MS, while the rest were regarded as controls (29.95% of male and 27.89% of female control subjects) (P > 0.05). The AGA males presented significantly higher systolic and diastolic blood pressure than the male control subjects (SP: P = 0.000; DP: P = 0.041). Among females with AGA, waist circumference, hip circumference, and waist-hip ratio elevated the loss of hair compared to that of the female controls (P = 0.000, P = 0.020, P = 0.001, respectively).

Conclusion: Our study indicated no direct association between AGA and MS in Chinese people. However, a close relationship was observed between AGA and systolic blood pressure.

Keywords: androgenetic alopecia; diabetes mellitus; dyslipidemia; metabolic syndrome; systolic blood pressure.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Science and Technology Service Network Project (STS Program) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KFJ-STS-ZDTP-063), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0201600), the Ministry of Science and Technology focused on the research of “Early identification, early diagnosis and cutting point of diabetes risk factors” (2016YFC1305700), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51925203, 81804100), Jiangsu Provincial Basic Public Health Service Innovation Pilot Project (WDF15-967), and Jiangsu Medical Device Industry Technology Innovation CenterJoint Fund (SYC2018004).