It's a bald fact...smoking makes your hair fall out!

According to new research apart from the plethora of illnesses associated with smoking the habit can make men prematurely bald.

Smoking has been linked to lung disease, heart and blood vessel disease, stroke and cataracts and cancers as well as impotence and tobacco-related diseases are some of the biggest killers in the world today.

Now a study by scientists, led by Dr Lin-hui Su, from the Far Eastern memorial hospital in Taiwan, has shown that smoking cigarettes can also encourage male hair loss.

Scientists say male baldness, or androgenetic alopecia, is a hereditary matter and caused in part by the male sex hormones.

Male baldness varies between different races and as a rule Asian men are less likely to become bald as they age than white Europeans or Americans but early hair loss in a smoker may be a warning signal of more serious damage elsewhere in the body.

The scientists became aware of the connection between smoking and baldness after conducting a survey of 740 Taiwanese men with an average age of 65.

The survey collected information on the age at which the men started losing their hair, the risk factors which may have affected their hair loss, and their smoking history and the men's height and weight were measured, and blood samples analysed.

The results showed that smoking led to significantly more baldness even after taking other factors into account.

The risk of hair loss though it increased with advancing age, nevertheless remained lower than the average risk for Caucasian men.

The researchers suggest that smoking may damage the micro-circulation supplying blood to the follicles.

The research is published in the journal Archives of Dermatology.