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Posts Tagged ‘medication’

Modern hair loss medication really works. That is the message being put out by top level hair clinics like the Harley Street Hair Clinic – which, as Britain’s most respected institution for hair loss research and treatment, packs a pretty hefty weight behind its opinions. The general consensus is this: modern research into the causes of hair loss has led to enough of an understanding of the underlying structures of balding ailments that medications designed to treat them really do work.

The most common cause of hair loss is an over production of a male androgen called DHT. DHT is basically a mutant product of testosterone – and it is the inhibition of DHT that is the goal of a lot of modern hair loss medication.

DHT stands for Dihydrotestosterone, a substance that cause the natural life cycles of hair follicles to collapse. Once a human scalp starts an over production of DHT, its hairs fall out without re-growth – and so baldness starts to appear on the head. Modern hair medication acts directly on the production of DHT in an attempt to halt, slow or even reverse the balding process. By suppressing the production of DHT, the hair loss medicine allows the natural life cycle of the hair time to regroup and restart. In the best case scenarios, modern hair loss medication has actually reclaimed balding areas by kicking the scalp’s production of follicles back into high gear. In most scenarios, the balding process is halted though not necessarily reversed.

There are two main courses of action open to anyone who suffers from hair loss and wishes to do something about it. Broadly speaking: hair loss medication, or hair loss treatment. Medication, as the name implies, seeks to halt, redress or even completely reverse hair loss through the application and (usually) long term use of unguents, creams and other preparations. Hair loss treatment seeks to replace lost hair with donor hair from other parts of the scalp.

These days, hair replacement is actually a pretty good bet. It involves removing individual follicles and implanting them in the receipt area: the follicles take root and then fall out, leaving the root behind. That root grows as a natural hair. On the other hand, hair loss medication seeks to offer an alternative to mild cases of hair thinning and loss.

There are three basic classes of hair medication that can be considered. Two are man made, to a greater or lesser degree – they both contain artificially synthesised compounds that inhibit the production of DHT – a testosterone related hormone that causes progressive baldness. Both of these men made varieties of hair loss medication have experienced a pretty satisfactory degree of achievement in patients experiencing thinning of the hair. The compounds they contain (in one case, a compound called finasteride) slow down the production of DHT, which can dramatically reduce or even stop the thinning. In some cases, uses of these compounds (usually presented as a cream or medicated shampoo) have even shown re-growth of hair after the DHT production has been halted.