Redheads hold a big advantage over others


OTTAWA -- Redheads have a striking advantage over blondes and brunettes that goes far beyond appearances, says Canadian medical research: they don't feel pain as sharply.
The work from McGill University in Montreal that found the single gene that makes their hair red also makes them react better to painkilling drugs.

The actual shade of red doesn't seem to matter.

Everyone has the gene called melanocortin-1. But most red-haired people, especially those of Irish ancestry, have a defective version. Gene researchers learned this in the early 1990s.

Jeff Mogil's lab at McGill, meanwhile, had started a hunt in mice for genes that govern how pain affects different people. That hunt led them unexpectedly to the red-hair gene -- at least in lab mice.

But his own lab doesn't do tests on humans, so he asked colleagues in Florida and the Netherlands to test whether the red-hair gene helps people too. "And after they stopped laughing, they agreed to try the study. And lo and behold, the gene does exactly the same thing in people as it does in mice."

"It's a double piece of good news."

For most painkillers in the morphine and codeine family, this applies equally to men and women with red hair, he says. There's another sub-group of morphine drugs that seems to get an extra boost only in red-haired women. It happens to be a type used mainly in obstetrics.

Other types of painkiller such as regular Aspirin and Tylenol don't affect redheads differently at all, while anesthetists have long known that redheads require more anesthesia to be put under.

By Tom Spears
-- CanWest News Service