Loose Anagen Hair Syndrome

Clinical Features

Anagen phase hair is actively growing hair. In the loose anagen hair syndrome, anagen hairs are easily pulled from the scalp. The hair is relatively sparse and does not grow long. Hair of fair color (Price and Gummer, 1989) and hair shafts of reduced caliber (Lalevic-Vasic et al., 1990), and an early age of onset (Hamm and Traupe, 1989) are features. Usually the hairs are not fragile and there are no areas of breakage. Slight flattening and longitudinal grooving has been noted on electron microscopy (Hamm and Traupe, 1989).

Murphy et al. (1995) described a sister and brother with the loose anagen hair syndrome in association with ocular coloboma (see 120200, 216820) which was bilateral in the brother and unilateral in the sister. Murphy et al. (1995) concluded that these were independent genetic traits.

Inheritance

Baden et al. (1992) postulated autosomal dominant inheritance with variable expressivity and noted at least 1 instance of male-to-male transmission.