NEWS AND VIEWS

26 October 2026

Understanding the triggers of autoimmunity might lead to better therapies, with hair loss among the conditions for which underpinning factors have come to light.

By

Jarish N. Cohen 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.

“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.…