Hair loss is one of the most con­found­ing con­di­tions a woman could ever expe­ri­ence. Women con­sider their hair as kings con­sider their crown; an impor­tant part of one’s iden­tity, an impor­tant part of one’s self. With that in mind, woman may often believe what­ever they hear and do what­ever they can just to sus­tain healthy hair.

In most cases when women notice increased hair loss and thin­ning it can be dev­as­tat­ing and affects their emo­tional state of con­fi­dence. How­ever women should not despair – hair loss can be pre­vented and stopped once you know what causes it and what you should do to.

There is a lot of infor­ma­tion that may dis­pel the “myths” of women’s hair loss but some of these so-called “myths” do have a basis for truth. I have exam­ined many of these pop­u­lar “myths” to facil­i­tate a bal­anced response.

 Myth Num­ber One: Fre­quent sham­poo­ing con­tributes to hair loss. It is rec­om­mended that extra care should be taken for frag­ile and thin­ning hair. These mea­sures include using gen­tle sham­poos; heav­ily med­icated sham­poos can affect the scalp. So, it’s not so much how fre­quently you wash your hair but what you wash your hair with!

Myth Num­ber Two: 100 strokes of the hair brush daily will cre­ate health­ier hair. Brush­ing your hair does stim­u­late the glands on your scalp to pro­duce oil that will keep your hair healthy. How­ever, a hun­dred brush strokes on thin­ning and frag­ile hair will be more dev­as­tat­ing than help­ful. It is impor­tant to look after thin­ning and frag­ile hair. Gen­tle brush­ing may be suf­fi­cient to the con­di­tion of your hair as well as sep­a­rat­ing tan­gles with your fin­gers. (Try­ing to brush out tan­gles may con­se­quently pull out your hair).

Myth Num­ber Three: Stand­ing on one’s head will cause increased cir­cu­la­tion and thereby stim­u­late hair growth. Although poor blood cir­cu­la­tion may cause some hair loss, increas­ing blood cir­cu­la­tion just does not stim­u­late hair growth either.

Myth Num­ber Four: Shav­ing one’s head will cause the hair to grow back thicker. This is just not true. In fact, if you are suf­fer­ing from andro­genetiic alope­cia, this will actu­ally severely quicken your hair loss.

Myth Num­ber Five: Hair loss does not occur in the late teens or early twen­ties. Although rea­son­ably rare this is not true. Alope­cia or hair loss may hap­pen to any­one regard­less of their age.

1. DHT Hair Loss: A Chem­i­cal Process

Dihy­drotestos­terone (DHT) is a nat­ural metabo­lite in the human body that is the main cause for hair loss.  The trou­ble starts once testos­terone com­bines with an enzyme present in the oil glands found in hair fol­li­cles. DHT shrinks the hair fol­li­cle which causes the hair fol­li­cle gets smaller and finer. This is referred to as minia­tur­iza­tion with which the hair ulti­mately falls off. This is how DHT is respon­si­ble for about 95% of hair loss. The men or women who lose more hair are those who are genet­i­cally pre-disposed in pro­duc­ing more DHT than others.

2. Mir­a­cle Hair Care Prod­ucts for Baldness?

 There is no mir­a­cle hair care prod­uct that will stop bald­ing. How­ever, if a prod­uct blocked enzyme pro­duc­tion in the oil glands and DHT it should result in block­ing the hor­mone that causes balding.

3. FDA Approved Prope­cia for DHT Hair Loss

 Finas­teride is a drug that was used to treat prostate can­cer but the FDA has tested this drug and found that it reduces the pro­duc­tion of the enzyme 5 alpha thereby reduc­ing DHT lev­els. Hair loss is pre­vented when using this drug, how­ever it is only intended for males to use as a pre­ven­ta­tive hair loss solution.

Causes of hair loss induced by scalp infections.

Fol­li­culi­tis

Fol­li­culi­tis is a term for inflam­ma­tion of hair fol­li­cles. It looks like acne with lit­tle rings of inflam­ma­tion sur­round­ing the open­ing of a hair fol­li­cle. In the early stages of a fol­li­culi­tis, the hair fiber may still be present, but as the fol­li­culi­tis pro­gresses the hair often falls out. There are non-infectious forms of fol­li­culi­tis, such as those caused by oils and greases applied to the skin that clog up the hair fol­li­cles, but fol­li­culi­tis is usu­ally due to a bac­te­r­ial infec­tion. Non­pre­scrip­tion top­i­cal antibi­otics such as bac­i­tracin, myc­i­tracin, or neomycin can be used to treat minor folliculitis

Piedra

Piedra (tri­chomy­co­sis nodu­laris) hap­pens when the hair fibers are infected by a fun­gus. The vis­i­ble indi­ca­tor of a piedra infec­tion is devel­op­ment of hard nod­ules on hair fibers. Indeed, “piedra” is Span­ish for stone. Piedra infec­tion may affect hairs of the scalp, body, and gen­i­tal areas. Usu­ally the infec­tion is rel­a­tively benign. In parts of Malaysia, the nod­ules of black piedra are con­sid­ered attrac­tive and tra­di­tion­ally women encour­aged its growth by sleep­ing with their hair buried in the soil. Treat­ment gen­er­ally involves shav­ing off affected areas. Anti-fungals such as keto­cona­zole or terbinafine are also used.

Demodex fol­licu­lo­rum

Demodex is a lit­tle worm-like crea­ture that likes to live on skin and in hair fol­li­cles. It feeds on dead skin and oils, so it par­tic­u­larly likes to live in hair fol­li­cles where there are lots of both.

Humans are born free of Demodex, but dur­ing child­hood, through con­tact with oth­ers, the skin can become infected with it. For the most part, we never know they are there. They are benign, if repul­sive, lit­tle crea­tures. The most com­mon prob­lem with Demodex is that they may cause irri­ta­tion, par­tic­u­larly in the eye­lashes. If you have itchy eye­lashes, Demodex may be the problem.

Fol­lic­u­lar unit extrac­tion is a method used to har­vest grafts in the least inva­sive way.  Fol­lic­u­lar unit extrac­tion enables the sur­geon to extract hair fol­li­cles using a tiny punch, with­out the need to remove a strip of hair bar­ing skin. This method of har­vest­ing hair fol­li­cles is what makes FUE dif­fer­ent from the stan­dard hair restora­tion pro­ce­dure. In the typ­i­cal sur­gi­cal hair restora­tion pro­ce­dure a strip of skin con­tain­ing bald resis­tance fol­li­cles is removed, this strip is then dis­sected care­fully under mag­ni­fi­ca­tion to pro­duce indi­vid­ual hair grafts. Both the extrac­tion and the strip exci­sion pro­ce­dure pro­duce com­pa­ra­ble micro grafts. The major dif­fer­ence between the two meth­ods is the har­vest­ing of the grafts.

The Pros and Cons of Fol­lic­u­lar Unit Extraction

Pros

·         Fol­lic­u­lar unit extrac­tion is the min­i­mally inva­sive way which fol­lic­u­lar unit grafts are removed.

·         There is less trauma to the graft dur­ing the extrac­tion process then with the tra­di­tional method

·         Patients who have reduced donor den­si­ties, due to poor hair qual­ity in the donor area, have a bet­ter, health­ier selec­tion of grafts.

·         Patients with tight scalps, where tra­di­tional strip har­vest­ing can be prob­lem­atic, are able to receive hair restora­tion now that this method is being used.

·         There is no vis­i­ble scar, patients who like to keep a short hair cut would ben­e­fit from this

Cons

·         The max­i­mum amount of grafts can­not be harvested

·         Grafts har­vested from places other than the donor area will not be permanent

·         The cost is twice as much as the tra­di­tional procedure

·         Prob­lems of “cap­ping” (this is when the top of the graft pulls off dur­ing the extraction)

·         Mul­ti­ple ses­sions are required to equal one strip method procedure

·         Patients with curly or fine hair are gen­er­ally not good can­di­dates for FUE

There are a lot of health issues that start to occur when you have Hypothy­roidism. The prob­lem that causes the most con­cern is hair loss.

Hypothy­roidism can cause many prob­lems; one of the most com­mon prob­lems is hair loss. The sever­ity of hair loss varies, it may be as small as the hair thin­ning, to large chunks of hair falling out, or it could be just a change of tex­ture mak­ing it become dry, brit­tle and coarse. Hav­ing hypothy­roidism under con­trol is the first step towards pre­vent­ing hair loss. Luck­ily it is very easy to treat; there are many med­ica­tions that restore the thy­roid gland func­tion. How­ever, treat­ment of the hypothy­roidism may not always result in re-growth of the hair. Here are a few ways to stop hair loss with hypothy­roidism before it hap­pens. Make sure it’s not your thy­roid drug. If your are tak­ing lavothy­roxin (i.e., Syn­throis) as your thy­roid hor­mone replace­ment, and still los­ing hair you should talk to your Doc­tor about alter­na­tive med­i­cines if in fact the med­ica­tion is the cause of your hair loss. Exces­sive hair loss may be a side effect of Syn­throid. Not being at the right TSH or not tak­ing the right drugs can cause hair loss so it is very impor­tant to be prop­erly treated. Nat­ural herbs are an alter­na­tive to med­ica­tion that aids in hair loss pre­ven­tion, the fol­low­ing vit­a­mins are an exam­ple of a few.

Argi­nine

Cys­teine

Green Tea

Polysor­bate 80

Prog­es­terone

Saw pal­metto

Tri­chosac­caride

Vit­a­min b6

Zinc

Accord­ing to the online� Med­ical Libary, 25% of men show signs of bald­ness by age 30 and two thirds by age 60. Hair Loss affects toughly 40 % of men thats why men are start­ing to take action with hair­trans­plan­taion when there is even a slight sign of bald­ing.� The most dra­matic area to lose hair is the frontal area (hair line). This tends to cause a man to look bald even with only a slight loss of hair. The num­ber of young men start­ing treat­ment with prope­cia and hair restora­tion is increas­ing. It is com­mon for men with min­i­mal hair loss to seek a sur­gi­cal hair trans­plant. Most men with frontal hair loss are excel­lent can­di­dates for fol­lic­u­lar hair transplants.

For most men with male pat­tern bald­ness, frontal hair loss is the most com­mon. This is char­ac­ter­ized by a front to back pro­gres­sion of hair loss. For most men there is gen­er­ally more lim­ited hair loss in the�crown, even with advanced hair loss, the hair loss moves back until with many it causes bald­ness from the front to the crown, leav­ing the sides and back of the head pro­duc­ing a fair amount of hair. Direc­tion of hair growth enables cov­er­age of the area imme­di­ately in front of it and to the side to give the most nat­ural appearance.