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Nerve activity initiates autoimmune hair loss
Jarish N. Cohen is in the Department of Dermatology and the Department of Pathology at the University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94143, USA.
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“I’m as free as my hair,” proclaims the pop star Lady Gaga in her song ‘Hair’. Indeed, hair can be a statement of freedom and it informs our sense of self. Conversely, baldness (a condition called alopecia) can be considered an attack on the self, not only in a psychological sense, but also in a literal sense through autoimmunity, in which immune cells that usually ignore the body’s own tissues instead damage organs and cause problems such as hair loss. Writing in Nature, Cui et al.1 provide insights into autoimmune hair loss from their studies of mice.
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