Shaving, Sex and Heart Disease

Feb 07 (Reuters Health) - Men who don't shave every day enjoy less sex and are 70% more likely to suffer a stroke than daily shavers, a new study shows.

A team at Bristol University in England who examined the link between shaving, coronary heart disease and stroke in 2,438 middle- aged Welsh men found that men who did not shave every day were also more likely to suffer a heart attack.

Over the course of the 20-year study, there were 835 deaths, they reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Forty-five percent of the men who shaved less than daily died compared with 31% of those who shaved at least once a day.

Many of the excess deaths were probably due to the fact that men who shaved less often were more likely to smoke and to have poorer lifestyles than other men, but the scientists said this did not explain their substantially raised risk of strokes.

The findings also show that men who don't shave every day are less likely to be married and are more likely to be blue-collar workers. They also have fewer orgasms and tend to be shorter and to suffer from a type of chest pain called angina.

"The association between infrequent shaving and death is probably due to underlying smoking and social factors, but a small hormonal effect may also exist," said Professor Shah Ebrahim in the Department of Social Medicine.

He said the association with stroke did not fall away after discounting lifestyle factors and remained unexplained.

After other factors tied to health were accounted for, such as testosterone levels, social factors and whether or not men had heart disease when the study began, the researchers found that men who shaved less than once a day were 24% more likely to die from any cause, 30% more likely to die of heart disease and 16% more likely to have a coronary heart disease event such as a heart attack compared to men who shaved daily.

Ebrahim told Reuters Health the link between circulating sex hormones and beard growth was first established when a man on a remote island in the Hebrides noticed that his beard grew vigorously when he was about to rejoin his girlfriend on the Scottish mainland.

He said the low frequency of orgasm in men who did not shave regularly might be because they had low levels of testosterone or might simply reflect the fact that they were unmarried and had less opportunity for sex.

One possible explanation for the raised risk of stroke was that levels of circulating sex hormones in the body might influence the process in which fatty deposits build up in the arteries.

SOURCE: American Journal of Epidemiology 2003;157:234-238.

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