Cow placenta can cure male pattern baldness

By Syed Akbar
Hyderabad: The cure for baldness now lies in goshala. Extract obtained from cow's placenta or umbilical cord is capable of regrowing hair and treating baldness.
Though hair loss or baldness is an irreversible process, certain hormones present in the placenta of cow can work wonders by triggering hair growth on a bald head. Cow placental extract is a natural and cheap equivalent to the chemical, minoxidil, which is now widely used by hair experts.
"The hormones and cytokins in cow's placenta promotes hair growth not only by elongating hair shaft but also by increasing the number of hair follicles," points out Dr L Mira, one of the scientists involved in the research.
According to Dr Mira, the extract of cow's placenta is also useful in other cosmetic applications including whitening of the skin and increasing its tone and texture. Dr Mira is part of the Korean team of scientists, which carried out research on Indian cows in goshalas.
The discovery comes close on the heels of a finding by a team of German bacteriologists involved in Indo-German joint research that cow's dung or gobar has actually been protecting Indians from outbreaks of Escherichia coli. The E coli strain present in cow and buffalo is more harmful than the strains that exist in human colon. Thanks to their contact with gobar for thousands of years, Indians have developed immunity to E coli and this explains why there have been no cases of E coli outbreaks in India's history.
"German scientists are surprised and amused on visibly unhygienic conditions in certain parts of India, such as heaps of garbage, open drains etc., and apparently healthy people with no institutionalised outbreaks of E coli. They find Indians could actually be immune to the dangerous E coli strains," pointed out Dr Niyaz Ahmed, who leads the Indian side of the Indo-German team.
After German scientists went back to basics trying to find in cattle sheds the origin of the novel E coli strain, which caused havoc in Europe last month, the Korean team took the lead to discover medical uses of cow's placenta.
The research was carried out on crude placental extract but the results were more than encouraging. "If refinement is done, the placenta extract would be a good candidate medicine for hair loss," the team noted. The research was carried out on rat model with successful results. Further work is on to transpolate it on human beings.
Cow's placenta contains many kinds of hormones and cytokines including epidermal growth factor, fibroblast growth factor and corticotropin-releaseing hormone. Extracts from these substances may serve many of the medical needs in future, scientists believe.