Hair Loss Guide

General Health and Hair Loss

Your hair loss can be much more than an inconvenience or an aesthetic preference. Rather, it can offer you warning signs of other major health problems. Battling your hair loss may also give you the ability to improve your overall health.

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Hair Loss (scientific name for the most common is Androgenetic Alopecia)

The medical name for the most common type of hair loss is Androgenetic Alopecia, the common name is pattern baldness. Pattern Baldness impacts both men and women although it is more common and devastating in terms of actual hair loss in men.

Male Pattern Baldness

Typically, male pattern baldness starts with a receding hairline and then advances to thinning at the top of the head before proceeding from there. Male pattern baldness may begin anytime after the onset of puberty, but typically starts in the late 20’s and early 30’s.

Pattern baldness patterns are commonly classified and recognized based on the degree of thinning, the affected areas, and the speed of hair loss. More than 36 million men in the United States experience male pattern baldness, including 50-80% of Caucasian men. As it happens, African Americans and other races tend to have slightly lower risk of male pattern baldness.

Female Pattern Baldness

Female pattern baldness appears as more diffuse hair loss that occurs over most of the scalp. For women, these symptoms of baldness or androgenetic alopecia appear commonly, in fact approximately 20-40% of the general female population will experience some for of hair loss, but it is different than in men. Different to men, women will rarely get bald spots but experience more diffuse hair loss – or an overall thinning effect which may not be as immediately obvious to the casual observer but can make hair-styling and appearance more challenging.

How Pattern Baldness Develops

DHT causes Androgenetic Alopecia or Pattern Baldness. Our hair follicles have many receptors for DHT and a genetic predisposition for hair loss. Thus, Pattern Baldness develops as the hair follicles get smaller and spend less time in the active growth phase. This causes your hair to shed faster than before. While new hair must grow to replace the hair that is shed, as hair follicle shrinks your replacement or new hair becomes thinner and thinner. At some point, some areas of your scalp may have a very thin layer of hair (peach fuzz) or total baldness.

The DHT Factor

The most widely accepted theory of what causes male Pattern Baldness is the DHT factor. DHT is produced when the enzyme 5 alpha reductase combines with testosterone and the DHT then attaches to the hair follicle. This eventually causes it to stop producing hair.

It’s like a heavy rock on your chest that will not let you stand up and barely allows you to breath. You can’t eat, breathe, or do anything else, so while you may survive for a period of time, eventually you will die. This is the impact DHT has on your hair follicles.

By depriving your hair follicles of food and oxygen, those hair follicles weaken and therefore produce thinner and thinner hair until they die and stop producing hair altogether. This is when you may start noticing the thinning of your hair and even bald patches on your scalp.

Certainly all humans produce DHT, but there exists an inherited genetic trait (that can come from both sides of your family), that will make some more susceptible to DHT. You are probably not surprised to learn that hair loss can be genetic, just think of the people you know. Of course, besides DHT there are other secondary factors that also contribute to the hair loss but they do not cause pattern baldness. These secondary factors impact how susceptible (weak) the hair follicle is to the effects of DHT. It’s important to be aware of these additional factors so that you can increase your ability to fight DHT and increase your chances of preventing and halting hair loss through the blocking of DHT.