Category: Hair Loss Causes

I seemed to have damaged a small area of my mustache, and I’ve waited 6 months and the hair hasn’t grown back.

I was using 1 of those luffa (loufa) facial scrub pads, and went across my mustache, when I looked at the pad, I noticed complete hairs on the scrub pad, and the bottom tips of them were wait. And now there is a clear small bald spot in my mustache to the point that, I’ve decided to shave my mustache completely off. It just looks ridiculous with that patch missing.

My question is, is the area forever damaged, and what can be done to regrow the hair. My wife misses my mustache as much as I do.

If your mustache does not come back in another 3 months, the only way you can get it back is to transplant it. Hair transplantation works well in facial beard defects. At that point, you can make a trip to my LA office (you indicated you weren’t too far away) for a free consult. I’d give it some more time though to regrow on its own.

Thank you Dr. Rassman for maintaining a wonderful blog and for being a generally nice guy. My history is a bit checkered:

Seven Years ago I was told by Dr. Bernstein (another really nice guy by the way) that based on family history I might have diffuse pattern alopecia although only the vertex was thinning. He put me on Propecia and refused to operate till some time passed. The Propecia worked well but I had elevated liver enzymes from fatty liver deposits and stopped it after a year. After six years I have lost a lot of hair on the crown but the rest of my hairline did not vanish as I expected. In fact the crown is noticeable precisely because the rest of my hair is present. So basically from a thinning vertex I now have a bald vertex but the rest is intact. I don’t know about miniaturization though.

1. Question 1. My liver readings are the same. What are my options?
2. Unrelated question 1. I have always wondered whether i have mild trichitillomania. I ask because I never pull my hair hard but I used to (and still sometimes do) very very gently test my vertex hairs and they always slip out readily. The test is so mild that on my permanent zone I can barely feel the tug and yet on the vertex two out of three hairs slip out. Have I harmed myself with this “strength test or were these weaklings doomed anyway?” Incidentally the hairs would not come out when I took Propecia.
3. Unrelated question 2. My biggest discomfort from my bald spot is the dampness from sweating on the bald crown. In New York my scalp sweats profusely from the heating indoors and once outdoors it feels colder than the rest of my head even with a hat. In fact the hat in contact with the bald spot feels awful.

1. People with liver disease just need to take a smaller dose of Propecia and they can be on that medication. Without seeing you I can not make judgments. I’d see Dr. Bernstein again.
2. I don’t know if you have a mild case of trichotillomania, but if you’re just gently pulling on the hair to see if it comes out, it may just produce traction alopecia. Trichotillomania is an obsessive compulsive disorder, and it doesn’t seem like that’s what you’ve got going on… but I really couldn’t diagnose trichotillomania over the internet like this.
3. Bald heads do sweat in hot weather and lose body heat in cold weather. Hair allows air to move through it in hot weather acting like a radiator effect. In the winter it acts like a blanket as it insulates the scalp where the blood supply is quite high (in the winter) so the body does not lose heat. When Napoleon’s French troops invaded Russia in the early part of the 19th century, the first soldiers to die from the harsh cold temperatures were those who had balding.

My hair started frontal thinning 6 months ago and now i am almost completely bald up front. i have two questions.

1. does it make sense it fell out so fast?
2. i’ve been visiting a dermatologist and he said it was a form alopecia and he injected it with steroids. not to insult his credentials but it doesn’t look like any of the alopecia pictures i seen online and my hairline is starting to look like my dads could it be a misdiagnosis.

Really, you didn’t supply any information to work with here. If you are a male, injecting steroids in male pattern balding could be very damaging. If you are a female, it may not be as damaging as with a male, but I am not familiar with the benefits unless your doctor thinks that you have some autoimmune form of alopecia.

Alopecia is just another word for “hair loss” — so unless there is a defined form of alopecia (such as alopecia areata), I’m not sure what your doctor diagnosed you with. You should go back to that doctor and find out what your condition is and be sure to ask as many questions as you need to. Open communication between doctor and patient is a really beneficial thing to both parties.

Here’s a patient that reported continued growth of his hair transplants without going through the dreaded dormant phase that usually occurs for some time following the procedure. Now to be honest, the After photos were taken just under 2 years after the surgery so I can’t say I saw this instant (or continued) growth with my own eyes… but the patient is a doctor and is convinced that the reason he didn’t experience any fall-out was due to taking vitamin B2 and fish oils. I’ll leave it up to you if you want to try that approach in hopes of continued hair growth following a transplant, but I wanted to share the results here nonetheless. Click the photos to enlarge.

After one procedure of 2031 grafts

 

Before

 

I went through quite a difficult and traumatic break up about a year ago. Since then I have got over it but a few months ago I noticed a lot of hair shedding. Could the two be connected? The hair shedding seems to have stablised but I am noticably thinner across the top of my head – the crown area and forward, but no receding or thinning at the front. I am 33 – is it likely to just be male pattern baldness? Or am I clutching at straws thinking it might be the stress?

The break-up and your hair loss could be related, as stress-related hair loss can occur from emotional causes. Or it could be coincidence, with this being the start of genetic hair loss.

You should see a doctor for a diagnosis and make sure that he maps out your scalp for signs of balding (miniaturization).

First off I would like to say thank you for answering people’s questions on this site. I’ve learned more here on the subject of hair loss than anywhere else. I have a few questions that I would appreciate some clarification on. I’m a 17 year old white male. My family tree doesn’t have much of a history of hair loss. My father is Norwood 2 at 50, and both of my grandfathers had full heads of hair, and so does my mom’s brother. The last bald person in the family was my maternal great grandfather. My hairline is probably identical to my fathers.

You spoke before of people having the balding gene but not expressing it – I’m wondering if that could be the case with any of these people and that I could have possibly inherited it. If it were, are there any triggers that could trigger it that I could avoid? For example, you said malnutrition can activate the gene. Specifically does that mean not getting enough calories, vitamins and minerals, or eating too much salt, fat, sugar, etc.

I’m also considering starting urine therapy for something completely unrelated to hair loss, but I read that male urine contains DHEA, which is supposedly another trigger of the gene. Do you think the amount of DHEA in urine would be sufficient to have any negative affect on hair loss?

I am assuming that you plan on ingesting the urine, as opposed to applying it on your scalp. I don’t think drinking it would be a negative on your hair (nor would applying it to the scalp — though I don’t know why you’d do that), but I have to admit that I don’t know a lot about urine therapy. Anyone with more experience in this area would be welcome to add a comment.

I do know that avoiding potential hair loss triggers really isn’t a great way to prevent hair loss, so long as you have functioning testicles. In other words, anything can potentially trigger it and there’s no perfect checklist to guarantee you’re safe from genetic hair loss.