RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Health Status by Gender, Hair Color, and Eye Color: Red-Haired Women are the Most Divergent
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 139295
DO 10.1101/139295
A1 P. Frost
A1 K. Kleisner
A1 J. Flegr
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/17/139295.abstract
AB Red hair is associated with pain sensitivity, and more so in women than in men. Hair redness may thus interact with a female-specific factor. We tested this hypothesis on a large sample of Czech and Slovak respondents. They were asked about the natural redness and darkness of their hair, their natural eye color, their physical and mental health (24 categories), and other personal attributes (height, weight, number of children, lifelong number of sexual partners, frequency of smoking). We found that red-haired women did worse than other women in ten health categories and better in only three. In particular, they were more prone to colorectal, cervical, uterine, and ovarian cancer. Cancer risk increased steadily with increasing hair redness except for the reddest shade. Red-haired men showed a balanced pattern of health effects, doing better than other men in three categories and worse in three. Number of children was the only category where both male and female redheads did better than other respondents. Of the ‘new’ hair and eye colors, red hair diverges the most from the ancestral state of black hair and brown eyes. It is the most sexually dimorphic variant, not only in population frequency but also in health outcomes.