Red Hair of Pathological Origin
Most red hair is caused by the MC1R gene and is non-pathological. However, in rare cases red hair can be associated with disease or genetic disorder:
- In cases of severe malnutrition, normally dark human hair may turn red or blonde. The condition, part of a syndrome known as kwashiorkor, is a sign of critical starvation caused chiefly by protein deficiency, and is common during periods of famine.
- One variety of albinism (Type 3, aka rufous albinism), sometimes seen in Africans and inhabitants of New Guinea, results in red hair and red-colored skin.
- Red hair is found on people lacking pro-opiomelanocortin.
Read more about this topic: Red Hair
Famous quotes containing the words red, hair, pathological and/or origin:
“Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.”
—Bible: Hebrew Isaiah, 1:18.
“The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient’s ego freedom to decide one way or another.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“We have got rid of the fetish of the divine right of kings, and that slavery is of divine origin and authority. But the divine right of property has taken its place. The tendency plainly is towards ... “a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.””
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)