March 9 2009, 3:36 pm PT | Posted in: Hair Loss Causes
I read this news story about the last eunuch in China, named Sun Yaoting. At only 8 years old he was castrated… and looking at photos of him before his death in 1996 shows he was clearly bald. I thought castration was the “cure” for hair loss, not that anyone should ever go that far of course. So what’s the deal?
Here’s the news story: LA Times
Here’s the photo of him from the cover of a book: Book cover
Assuming that the castration was complete, there at least two explanations that come to mind:
- He had testosterone production from non-testicular sources. We known that women have testosterone and when they lose their estrogen support at menopause, they developing balding.
- This may show the phenomenon called apoptosis (a cell that has reached the end of its lifetime) and that the hair in the “patterned” areas had reached the end of their life.
I haven’t read the book and don’t know if there are photos throughout, but I would love to know what he looked like at age 40, 50, 60. Was he that bald at 40, 50, and 60 years old? We only have scant facts here, and I tried finding other photos online but just came up with that same one used on the book cover.
Paid advertisements (not an endorsement):
The last Eunuch in China did not go bald. This falsehood is being propagated on hair loss forums, mostly by people who have their own alternate theories for the etiology of AGA, and is based on a bad, overexposed, and maybe doctored picture on the cover of a book they’ve never read.
Look him up. There is one picture of him shortly before his death with the man who wrote his biography, and he has a full head of thick, but shortly cropped (which is why he looks bald) white hair.
Interestingly, however, he did develop a mature hair line, and since a castrate will have 30% of his baseline DHT and only 5% of his baseline T, this basically excludes T as the cause of at least his mature hair line…
… and probably everyone eles.