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It seems the efforts of Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center are finally ready to pay as they claim that they have found the genetic basis of alopecia areata which would make it easier to develop new treatments for the condition, in which loss can range from patches on the scalp to complete absence of hair on the entire body.

Alopecia Areata is a hair disease that affects hair loss from the human scalp and over 5 Millions people suffer from this disease. This perhaps is the most disease found in humans.

This research was conducted using more than 1,000 samples from the National Alopecia Areata Registry, a patient registry for alopecia areata funded by the National Institute for Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

Reserchers searched for a correlation between how many genes (each gene comes in two pairs) people with different severities of alopecia areata carried, and found that people who carried 13-14 genes had disease that did not progress, while those with 16 or more most often progressed to alopecia universalis, or total baldness.

This would help in judging the severity of the disease from peron to person.

If everything goes alright, youngsters who are reading this at the moment would walk bald in their old age as perhaps their Fathers or Grand Fathers must be doing.