The Science of Healthy Hair, Hair Loss and How to Regrow Hair

Minoxidil won't just slow the loss of hair from your scalp, it is also effective at slowing the loss of hair elsewhere in your body. How does it do that? ... It does that by extending the anagen phase ... For most people who are losing their hair quickly or who have already lost their hair, minoxidil alone is not going to be a sufficient treatment. However, minoxidil has been shown to be effective at slowing rates of hair loss in people that are starting to experience some hair loss.

One of the things that caffeine does is it is a fairly potent PDE inhibitor. By being a potent PDE inhibitor, it indirectly stimulates IGF-1 ... By ingesting caffeine or by applying topical caffeine ointment or cream to the scalp, you can suppress PDE sufficiently enough to increase IGF-1 and increase some hair growth, or at least maintain hair growth in that region.

You want to avoid being insulin resistant, because being insulin resistant and being obese can indeed lead to hair loss. And there are many people out there who are not obese who, nonetheless, are experiencing hair thinning and hair loss because they are insulin resistant by way of reduced IGF-1 activity.

The other thing that's really important for maintaining proper hair growth, this anagen phase, is that you need sufficient iron ... You can have your blood levels of iron measured ... For women, the levels of iron that you want are somewhere between 25 and 100; and for men, somewhere between 30 and 150.

The use of Ketoconazole shampoos 2-4 times per week with a scalp contact time of about 3-5 minutes has been shown to give about an 80% response rate of maintaining hair that would otherwise be lost.

Anything that reduces 5-alpha reductase is going to reduce DHT, is going to maintain or extend the growth phase, the anagen phase, of hair growth... Now, one substance that we know can inhibit 5-alpha reductase, although it does it pretty weakly, is saw palmetto.

Finasteride reduces DHT... and in doing so, it can increase hair count by as much as 20%. In addition, finasteride treatment... can reduce hair loss in 90% of all people that take it ... In addition, it's known to increase hair thickness by about 20-30% overall.

If you've heard, for instance, that you inherit your patterns of balding from your mother's father, that is not true. Although it is true that you do inherit certain genes that influence whether or not you have a predisposition to balding in particular parts of your head...

By age 50, approximately 50% of all men and women will have experienced significant enough hair loss that they start to notice it, and a large percentage—up to 85% of those people—will experience some sort of anxiety that leads them to go out and try and either halt or reverse that hair loss.

Minoxidil has also been associated with increases in the hormone prolactin. Prolactin is a hormone that's released from the pituitary. It is a hormone that acts, also, as a bit of a neurotransmitter, like many hormones; and it tends to be antagonistic, or in opposite, to dopamine.

If you've heard things like, don't wear a hat if you want to maintain your hair, or massage your scalp if you want your hair to grow faster; in some sense, that's true, but none of those manipulations on their own is going to robustly enhance the rate of your hair growth.

The hairs on your head will undergo ongoing growth for 4 to 6 or even 8 years. So, were you to not cut your hair, it would continue to grow... for up to 8 years.

It is true that our psychological well-being can impact both the coloration, or lack thereof, and the growth rates of our hair.

The combination of microneedling and minoxidil has been shown to be effective in recovering what are called dead zones. So, these are regions of the scalp that are either completely bald or mostly bald, for which there is, essentially, no stem cell population there, and the combination of minoxidil plus microneedling is somehow able to recover those stem cell populations and allow new hair to grow.

It should be obvious why Botox is being used to try and offset hair loss. It's decreasing the squinting, if you will, or the tensile nature of the scalp skin so that more blood flow can arrive at that stem cell follicle area.

Androgens such as testosterone and its derivatives, such as dihydrotestosterone... inhibit IGF-1 and cyclic AMP... which you just learned a few moments ago act to extend the anagen or growth phase of hair.

The numbers that are out there right now—it's that topical finasteride is associated with 30-50% fewer side effects, or 30-50% less severe side effects, than oral finasteride.

Post-finasteride syndrome is when, typically it's males... will... stop taking finasteride... and they start to experience some very severe, what can only be called syndrome, affects, such as very reduced libido, very reduced erectile function, very reduced mood to the point of depression, even suicidal depression.