The fact is, if you are start­ing to lose your hair then the ear­lier you start to deal with the prob­lem the longer you will be able to keep your hair. Like most other med­ical con­di­tions, if you treat the under­ly­ing prob­lem early it is much eas­ier, and much cheaper, than if you wait till it gets out of hand. As soon as you start to see extra hairs lay­ing on your pil­low in the morn­ing, or a clump in the shower drain, you need to have a plan to buy a hair loss treat­ment and start using it.

Of course, the big ques­tion then is which prod­uct or prod­ucts should you buy. Before you can answer that ques­tion you need to under­stand what is the under­ly­ing cause of your hair loss in the first place. Over 9 out of 10 men who expe­ri­ence early hair loss do so because of a hered­i­tary med­ical con­di­tion called Andro­genic Alope­cia. The com­mon name for this is Male Pat­tern Bald­ness. This name comes from the fact that men will tend to lose their hair in one of two pat­tern areas. Either they see thin­ning on the crown of the head which is the top, or they will have a reced­ing hair line above the fore­head. If left untreated these two areas will migrate toward each other and even­tu­ally combine.

The cause of this thin­ning is what you actu­ally need your hair loss rem­edy to treat. Within your body there are many hor­mones and hor­monal sub­stances. They actu­ally are the mes­sen­gers which keep your sys­tems oper­at­ing prop­erly. One of these, the male hor­mone testos­terone has many func­tions, but for our pur­poses we are inter­ested in what hap­pens when it is metab­o­lized by the enzyme 5-alpha reduc­tase. When this hap­pens a new sub­stance is formed called Dihy­drotestos­terone. This is actu­ally the metabo­lite which is respon­si­ble for male pat­tern bald­ness. Many hair replace­ment prod­ucts focus on the scalp and the health of the hair shaft, because this is eas­ier to do, and they neglect the real cause which is DHT. Any prod­uct you choose must deal with what causes hair loss at the root.

There are two meth­ods of slow­ing or stop­ping the affect of DHT. The first is to block the pro­duc­tion of it. The FDA has approved an oral med­ica­tion, Finas­teride, which seems to work well but it has many neg­a­tive side effects. These include loss of libido, sex drive, in men and poten­tial birth defects for preg­nant women. Because of this many peo­ple shy away from this drug. Two nat­ural alter­na­tives are Saw Pal­metto extract and Stingy Net­tle Root. Both of these also seem to limit the amount of DHT produced.

The sec­ond way of deal­ing with the prob­lem is to pro­tect the hair fol­li­cles, (hair roots) from attack in the first place. Another FDA approved drug, Minox­i­dil, does a good job of this by bond­ing with the recep­tors on the hair roots that the dihy­drotestos­terone would nor­mally bond to. This drug is actu­ally used by both men and women and it is applied to the scalp top­i­cally twice a day.

Start today to deal with your hair loss and be sure you are actu­ally treat­ing the root cause and not just the sur­face issues involved.

Make sure to pick up NEWSWEEK dou­ble issue: MAY 24 & 31, 2010

John Kahen, M.D the founder and med­ical direc­tor of Bev­erly Hills Hair Restora­tion is cur­rently fea­tured in NEWSWEEK mag­a­zine, an exclu­sive issue fea­tur­ing BEST DOCTORS IN THE GREATER LOS ANGELES.

With hair loss becom­ing a com­mon cause of con­cern amongst mil­lions of peo­ple across the world, every year a large num­ber of med­ica­tions, herbs, spices, nutri­tional sup­ple­ments, oils, sham­poos etc comes up in the mar­ket each claim­ing itself to be the panacea for hair loss. Each year, men suf­fer­ing from hair loss spend bil­lions of dol­lars in an attempt to treat their hair loss. Unfor­tu­nately, a large per­cent­age of all prod­ucts being mar­keted in the less than eth­i­cal hair loss treat­ment indus­try are com­pletely inef­fec­tive for the major­ity of those who use them.

If you are going bald you should seri­ously con­sider hair loss med­ica­tion treat­ments to halt or even reverse your hair loss. While there is no cure for hair loss drugs can often stop or even reverse alope­cia aer­ate in most peo­ple. Med­ica­tion for treat­ing hair loss slows thin­ning of the hair and increases cov­er­age of the scalp by grow­ing new hair and enlarg­ing exist­ing hairs.

Types of Med­ica­tions for Hair loss Treatment

Today there are two FDA approved med­ica­tions for hair growth – minox­i­dil which is sold over the counter as Rogaine, for both men and women, and Finas­teride, a pre­scrip­tion pill sold as Prope­cia, for men only. Two other drugs have been recently approved for hair growth and include a high-estrogen oral con­tra­cep­tive and Aldac­tone (How­ever, these two med­ica­tions are only for women due to their fem­i­niz­ing side effects.

Both these med­ica­tions slow thin­ning of the hair and increase cov­er­age of the scalp by grow­ing new hair and enlarg­ing exist­ing hairs. How­ever, the effec­tive­ness of finas­teride or minox­i­dil depends on your age and the loca­tion of hair loss. These med­ica­tions do not work for every­one, and you should not expect to re-grow a full head of hair.

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.

Hair loss affects both men and women, but bald­ing remains a fate reserved mostly for men. If addressed early Bev­erly Hills Hair Restora­tion can help find the right treat­ment, we have made it entirely pos­si­ble for men to pre­vent bald­ness and even re –grow lost hair. Early signs of hair loss symp­toms include thin­ning hair on top of the scalp and the grad­u­ally appear­ance of a bold spot (devel­op­ing a widow’s peak, or diffuse-spread hair loss over the entire scalp). If there’s a fam­ily his­tory of male or female pat­tern bald­ness, it is likely to increase the chance of devel­op­ing this con­di­tion. Pre­ven­tion treat­ments are avail­able at Bev­erly Hills Hair Restora­tion. Male pat­tern bald­ness is by far the most com­mon con­di­tion that Bev­erly Hills Hair Restora­tion deals with. Depend­ing on the stage of hair loss, var­i­ous com­bi­na­tion of clin­i­cally proven hair loss treat­ments are pro­vided to our patients. Hair growth booster prod­ucts and sup­ple­ments may be pre­scribed by Dr. Kahen if he feels his patient will achieve the best pos­si­ble results with this type of pre­ven­tion option.

A num­ber of things can cause exces­sive hair loss. For exam­ple, about 3 or 4 months after an ill­ness or a major surgery, you may sud­denly lose a large amount of hair. This hair loss is related to the stress of the ill­ness and is temporary.

Hor­monal prob­lems may cause hair loss. If your thy­roid gland is over­ac­tive or under­ac­tive, your hair may fall out. This hair loss usu­ally can be helped by treat­ment thy­roid dis­ease. Hair loss may occur if male or female hor­mones, known as andro­gens and estro­gens, are out of bal­ance. Cor­rect­ing the hor­mone imbal­ance may stop your hair loss.

Many women notice hair loss about 3 months after giv­ing birth. This loss is also related to hor­mones. Dur­ing preg­nancy, high lev­els of cer­tain hor­mones cause the body to keep hair that would nor­mally fall out. When the hor­mones return to pre-pregnancy lev­els, that hair falls out and the nor­mal cycle of growth and loss starts again.

Some med­i­cines can cause hair loss. This type of hair loss improves when you stop tak­ing the med­i­cine. Med­i­cines that can cause hair loss include blood thin­ners (also called anti­co­ag­u­lants), med­i­cines used for gout, med­i­cines used in chemother­apy to treat can­cer, vit­a­min A (if too much is taken), birth con­trol pills and antidepressants.

Cer­tain infec­tions can cause hair loss. Fun­gal infec­tions of the scalp can cause hair loss in chil­dren. The infec­tion is eas­ily treated with anti­fun­gal medicines.

Finally, hair loss may occur as part of an under­ly­ing dis­ease, such as lupus or dia­betes. Since hair loss may be an early sign of a dis­ease, it is impor­tant to find the cause so that it can be treated.

It appears that hair loss is inher­ited, but we don’t really know how. The fol­low­ing are pos­si­ble ways it could be inherited:

A prob­lem with a sin­gle gene that may or may not affect all men the same
A prob­lem with a pair of genes that are related to sex chro­mo­somes
A prob­lem with mul­ti­ple genes
A per­son who expe­ri­ences hair loss can have a fam­ily his­tory of hair loss on either side of the fam­ily. On the other hand, there may be no fam­ily his­tory of hair loss. The good news is if some­one in your fam­ily suf­fers from hair loss, it does not nec­es­sar­ily imply that you will expe­ri­ence hair loss in your life time as well.

At Bev­erly Hills Hair Restora­tion, Dr.�Payam John Kahen, M.D. �uses the�latest tech­niques such as HairDX genetic test­ing to test for pos­si­ble genetic fac­tor in hair loss.� Bev­erly Hills Hair Restora­tion is�only the�few hair trans­plant surgery clin­ics serv­ing Los Ange­les, Bev­erly Hills and South­ern Cal­i­for­nia which offers such a test to the patients.