Is stress making David Beckham lose his hair?

March 31, 2005

It's blamed for nearly everything else, so it's easy to lump hair loss in with the other assorted evils of stress. Life's not quite that simple.

Stress is thought to be one of the triggers of certain types of hair loss but the evidence is far from conclusive.

At 29, David Beckham's reportedly thinning barnet is most likely to be a result of male pattern baldness, something that happens to plenty of men as they get older, rather than stress.

"If you're looking at female pattern and male pattern alopecia, stress has no effect on that at all," says Susan Macdonald Hull, a consultant dermatologist at Mid-Yorkshire hospitals NHS trust.

But acute stress can be one of the causes of something called telogen effluvium. It is a pattern of hair loss that usually occurs after physical stress such as childbirth or surgery. In any case, the effects only last a few months and most people grow their hair back.

Macdonald Hull says that chronic stress, on the other hand, does not have the same effect.

Hair loss happens for lots of reasons. The most common is genetics - if your parents or grandparents are bald, the chances are that you will be too.

Then there are the physical reasons, such as using hair cosmetics too often or incorrectly; or pulling hairs out by brushing too much.

Abnormal levels of hormones in the body could also play a part. In women, for example, an increase in male hormones such as testosterone can cause hair thinning over the crown of the scalp.

Then there is disease. In alopecia areata, small patches of hair fall out. What causes the condition is unknown, but some scientists suspect that it is a disease which attacks the immune system. If it is, then stress might have an effect as it can suppress the immune system.