Category: Hair loss
6 articles in this category.
- Alopecia — The medical umbrella term for hair loss — a word that, charmingly, comes from the Greek for 'fox.' It covers everything from ordinary pattern baldness to autoimmune patches to the hair you shed three months after a stressful summer.
- Alopecia areata — An autoimmune condition in which the body's own immune system attacks hair follicles, producing sudden, smooth, coin-shaped bald patches. The hair often grows back — sometimes white first — and after a century of few options, the first real drugs arrived in 2022.
- Androgenetic alopecia — Ordinary male- and female-pattern baldness, and the single most common cause of hair loss. It is driven by genetics and by the follicle's sensitivity to a hormone called DHT, which slowly shrinks hairs until they all but vanish.
- Finasteride — The other main hair-loss drug — and unlike minoxidil, it attacks the cause. By blocking the enzyme that makes DHT, it slows the hormone-driven shrinking of follicles. Its discovery traces back to a study of people genetically unable to make DHT at all.
- Minoxidil — One of the two main drugs for hair loss — and a famous accident. It was developed as a pill for dangerously high blood pressure, until doctors noticed patients sprouting hair in unexpected places and turned the side effect into a product.
- Telogen effluvium — The alarming but usually harmless hair shedding that arrives a couple of months after a shock to the body — an illness, surgery, childbirth, crash diet, or major stress. It looks dramatic, and it almost always grows back.