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There may be a solution at hand for the scourge of male pattern baldness.

(Handout)

You've tried Rogaine. You've tried deep-scalp massage. You've tried prayer.

Now it's time to get serious about saving what's left of your thinning hair.

Here's what you do: Grab hold of a strand of hair and yank it out of your head. Then move on to the next one and the one after that. If you do it right -- voila! -- you could soon have a thick head of hair once again.

That's right, you must cut down a few trees to regrow the forest.

Sound counterintuitive? It's called "quorum sensing" -- the way a system reacts to trauma to a segment of the system.

In this case, when you pluck hairs, your hair-follicle system sends out a distress signal "by releasing inflammatory proteins, which recruit immune cells to rush to the site of the injury," USC News reports. "These immune cells then secrete signaling molecules such as tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-a), which, at a certain concentration, communicate to both plucked and unplucked follicles that it's time to grow hair."

A research team led by USC Keck School of Medicine professor Cheng-Ming Chuong has proven through tests on mice that by plucking out hairs in a specific way, expansive new hair growth occurs. "Plucking hair at different densities leads to a regeneration of up to five times more neighboring, unplucked resting hairs, indicating activation of a collective decision-making process," the researchers report in the journal Cell. In the study, the plucking of 200 hairs resulted in some 1,200 replacements growing out.

The trick is apparently in how you pluck the hairs and which ones you pluck. "When plucking the hairs in a low-density pattern from an area exceeding 6 millimeters in diameter, no hairs regenerated," USC News writes. "However, higher-density plucking from circular areas with diameters between 3 and 5 millimeters triggered the regeneration of between 450 and 1,300 hairs, including ones outside of the plucked region."

"Remarkably," the study states in Cell, "a hair follicle can only regenerate in concert with other follicles, but not autonomously."

So, has the long-sought cure for male pattern baldness arrived? Unfortunately, it's too soon to tell. After all, these tests were done on mice, not balding human men, who are typically loath to give up what's left of their hair, even for science. USC's Chuong believes the research could lead to new treatment for alopecia.

-- Douglas Perry