(WebMD) -- For years I thought the battle between me and my thinning hair was waged on one front: my forehead. But my genes opened a second front without warning. Seeing the back of my head one day in a restaurant with far too many mirrors, I saw a devastated terrain far beyond my receding hairline. The war was over. I had a classic case of male pattern baldness, in front and on top of my head.

I quickly accepted the terms offered by nature. I even achieved a state of peace when I read Sean Connery's advice to balding men. Upon being crowned "People" magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" in 1989, Connery said just leave your head be "and you don't have a problem." So Sean and I have let our heads be.

Now, after more than a decade, there is a reason to reconsider my thinning hair. A report in the January 24, 2000 issue of "Archives of Internal Medicine" suggests that the type of baldness a man experiences by age 45 may be linked to a greater risk for developing coronary heart disease. This is no death sentence, although there is nothing that men like me can do about it. Those who fit the pattern may want to take extra steps to reduce other risk factors. This the kind of report that makes me wonder, "Should I stop thinking about exercising every day and actually do it?"

It would be easier to keep avoiding exercise if the study was not so convincing. Researcher JoAnn Manson, M.D., D.P.H., professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, and her colleagues actually studied more than 19,000 men over a period of 11 years. They found that men with hair loss on the top of their heads had a 34 percent increased risk for developing coronary heart disease when compared with men with no hair loss or men with only receding hairlines.

The implications of the findings don't impress Philip Greenland, M.D., a spokesman for the American Heart Association and chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. "The additional risk is quite modest," he says. "To put it into some perspective, a person who has elevated cholesterol versus a person who has normal cholesterol has about a doubling or in some cases even a tripling of the risk. So that would be a 200 percent (or 300 percent) increase."

But if balding men have other risk factors, they might want to pay some attention to Manson's findings. Men with high blood pressure and extensive baldness, for instance, have an 80 percent increased risk compared to men with high blood pressure and full heads of hair. Worse, men with extensive baldness and high cholesterol have nearly a three-fold higher risk compared to men with hair and high cholesterol. And, no, the risks do not appear to be reduced by any treatment that regrows hair, Manson says.

As a devotee of the "forget about it" school of baldness management, I never considered slathering my head with hair lotions, anyway. But this new study made me reconsider my lifelong, off-and-on-again effort to get daily exercise.

Maurizio Trevisan, M.D., professor and chairman of the department of social and preventive medicine, State University of New York at Buffalo, suggests that may be a good idea. "This should not be interpreted as saying bald people are doomed," he cautions. "The most important finding from the point of view of the consumer is that if you are bald, that is another incentive to check your cardiovascular risk. You can do a lot to control other risk factors."

Manson agrees. "People with this pattern of hair loss may want to be particularly attentive to risk factors for heart disease that can be changed," he suggests. These include the familiar admonitions to treat high blood pressure, lower high cholesterol, exercise regularly, avoid smoking, and eat a heart-healthy diet.

Aside from a borderline cholesterol level and less than daily exercise, I had most of these covered before I read Manson's paper. Her data may inspire me to pull out the NordicTrack(TM) every day and cut even more cholesterol from my diet. But nothing will ever convince me to do anything other than leave my head be. Sean and I are together on that.