The Inheritance Of Common Baldness: To Be Or Not To Be?

The document challenged the widely accepted view that androgenetic alopecia was caused by an autosomal dominant gene with reduced penetrance in women, as proposed by Osborn in 1916. Instead, it presented five arguments supporting a polygenic inheritance model: the high prevalence of the trait, the distribution of balding patterns along a Gaussian curve, the increased risk with more affected relatives, the slightly higher risk for relatives of severely affected women, and the greater importance of maternal inheritance. The study concluded that the simple Mendelian model of inheritance could no longer be upheld.