Hair Loss
Our hair is considered to be one of our defining features. We can grow our hair long, keep it short, it can be styled, coloured and dressed. It is often our crowning glory and can be part of how we define our character. We humans spend over a hundred billion dollars each year on products to care for our hair. Many tribal cultures believe that our hair is tightly intertwined with our spirit and sense of identity. The process of grooming the hair is considered to be a show of self respect.
But what happens when we start to lose that lustrous, thick hair of our younger years? A part of us has been lost, and that loss is on show daily.
Hair loss takes place for many reasons. Hormonal imbalance, grief, stress, shock, illness, drug reactions, hair treatment reactions, exposure to ionising radiation or electromagnetic pulses, exposure to environmental toxins, alcohol consumption, smoking, rapid weight loss, diet, pregnancy, child birth and even genetic traits can all lead to hair loss.
According to Grand View Research the main cause of hair loss is apparently still unknown. The hair restoration market continues to expand in response to an increasing need. In the United States alone expenditure on trying to stop hair loss was estimated to be $6.46 billion in 2023. Expenditure on hair restoration is expected to balloon by 16.6% each year to 2028.
A study in China has shown that people are loosing their hair at an increasingly younger age. Millennials are now finding it hard to hold on to their hair. Out of approximately 4000 student respondents from Tsinghua University, 60% were experiencing some form of hair loss, while another study at the same University suggested that there was a relationship between consumption of sugar and male patterned hair loss.
In the United States 85% of men and 40% of women now experience androgenetic hair loss, an immune-related hair condition, by the time they are 50 years of age according to the National Council on Aging.
The Daily Mail published a very revealing map in 2023 featuring the twenty countries whose men were most likely to be bald. Western Europe and the United States dominated the leaderboard with only one eastern European country, the Czech Republic, with the highest level of baldness. 39.23% of British males are bald, where 37.9% of American males are bald.
In Israel a skin clinic reported the clients they saw because of hair loss, had grown from 1.24% of their visitors in 2010, to 9.44% in 2020. The so-called male and female pattern baldness, or androgenetic alopecia, saw the greatest increase in the clinic from 17% to 32% in the same period.
Another condition Alopecia Areata, is where follicles in areas of the scalp are attacked by the immune system. This leads to distinct patches of baldness rather than generalised thinning or baldness.
So how does the excessive loss of hair actually happen, what treatments are available for hair loss and what can we do if we are experiencing hair loss?