Smoking causes over 50 health conditions, from lung cancer and heart disease to impotence. And as impotence always manages to 'scare' the consumers and make them more aware of the whole situation, you should now that tobacco smoking doesn't come just with yellowed nails and teeth: it also increases age-related baldness in men.

Male baldness affects 70 % of men as they grow older, and the main inner biological cause is a genetic vulnerability of the hair follicle to testosterone, the male sex hormone. But smoking seems to speed up what hormones trigger.

The research made at the Far Eastern Memorial Hospital in Taipei on over 700 Taiwanese male subjects aged over 40 and published in the journal Archives of Dermatology, showed that the increased smoking was correlated with more severe baldness.

The subjects were questioned about the age at which they started to experience hair loss, if they had a genetic background of baldness and about their smoking patterns. The team took into account men's height, weight, and hormonal levels.

The risk of hair loss was directly connected with advancing age, but was lower than the average value for Caucasian men. But smoking and hair loss had a direct connection, the heaviest smokers being most prone to male pattern baldness, even when all other factors (like genetics) were taken into account.

Men smoking at least 20 cigarettes daily were twice as likely to experience moderate or severe hair loss than male subjects who had never smoked. Also, it appeared that the risk of hair loss was still high included in former smokers.

Possible explanations could be that chemicals from the tobacco could harm DNA of the hair follicles, connected with the hair growth or damage hair root cells, impeding fueling blood supply.

Male-pattern baldness (genetic hair loss) can develop at any time, but most men first become aware of it at about the age of 30. It could be a sign of virility, but hair loss can have severe psychological effects on the self-esteem in young men.