Lost Weight, Taking Antidepressants — Which One Is Causing My Hair Loss?

Hello,
For the past two weeks or so I have noticed that my hair is falling out a lot more than usual. I recently started using a new acne face wash (it is not prescription) that is very strong. I also am taking Wellbutrin for depression, but I have been on it for a few months already. Also, I had a hairloss phase in the past that I thought was related to high blood sugar and unhealthy eating habits, but I recently have lost 30 lbs. I do not know which of these factors, if any, is causing this hair loss. What do you think?

Thank you

There is no way to separate the various causes for hair loss and blame the one or a combination of them. Weight loss on its own shouldn’t cause hair loss if it’s done in a healthy way, but I don’t have enough info on how fast you lost weight or in what way you did so. Extreme dieting can cause hair loss, though.

Also, Wellbutrin and other antidepressants are known to cause hair loss in some people. A full list of side effects can be found here (it’s listed on that page as alopecia). Stress can also be a cause of hair loss, and dieting and depression will likely involve stress in some form. There’s just too much going on for me to be able to pinpoint a cause of your hair loss. Sorry.

Analysis of My Donor Area

I have about 90 cm2 of baldness and about 200 cm2 of possible donor area. When I counted 1 cm2 of donor 3 times, I got 110,113 hairs and 123 follicular units per 1 cm2. I was wondering if the ones with red arrow are still the same follicular unit even though the hairs are spaced out compared to one with green arrow.

You are pointing out the follicular units that have more than one hair. Sometimes they exit the same pore and sometimes it appears to exit next to the main pore. The count of 110,113 hairs is about the average hair count in a Caucasian male and the number of follicular units are about 50,000 or 2.2 hairs per follicular unit on average. Clearly, some of the Follicular units have higher hair counts and others may just have a single hair. If you look at the leading edge of a normal hairline, you will see all single hair follicular units transitioning into more hairs per follicular unit as you move away from the leading edge. You were very astute in your analysis. The next step is to calculate the size of the balding area you are thinking about transplanting. That is just the beginning of the next analysis where multivariate analysis comes into play. The other variables that must be considered are (a) hair thickness, (b) character of your hair (wavy or straight), (c) the thickness of the hair shafts (fine, medium or coarse) and last and most important is where you are heading with your existing balding (based upon HAIRCHECK analysis, family history, your age, if you are going to treat the progressive nature of balding, and your long term medical plan with regard to going forward management).


2019-02-14 06:54:32Analysis of My Donor Area

Lyme Disease and Hair Loss?

Hi there….I am a female with diffused hair loss for almost 19 years. Eventually it will all be gone. I have been tested for all the diseases that cause hair loss. Could Lyme Disease cause hair loss? If so what kind of hair loss is seen with the disease? Hopefully you can help me, thanks!

You should be evaluated by a qualified hair transplant doctor or a dermatologist. You may have a condition known as diffuse alopecia areata , a variety of conditions (search women’s hair loss on this site) and you may have DUPA.

With respect to Lyme disease causing your hair loss, you would have many other medical problems if you had this disease for 19 years. It is conceivable that Lyme disease may cause hair loss, but it would be very non-specific, as many other disease states and stressors can affect hair loss. Therefore, I suspect your hair loss of 19 years is not related to Lyme disease.

From my nine years working with Dr. Rassman, he has taught me a simple way to approach any cause of hair loss. Hair loss can be divided in to five causes:

  1. Genetics – such as male pattern baldness
  2. Stress – such as emotional, disease states, or trauma
  3. Hormonal – such as hypothyroidism
  4. Age – we all lose hair with age
  5. Medical diseases including unexplained weight loss

By Dr. Jae Pak

Another Depleted Donor Area (Photo)

Over and over again, patients are getting a see-through donor area from over-aggressive donor FUE harvesting. There is a limit on how many FUE grafts can be harvested, and your doctor has an obligation to tell this to you.


2018-06-19 09:27:16Another Depleted Donor Area (Photo)

Male to Female (MTF) Male Wants to Take Estrogen to Reverse Hair Loss (From Reddit)

Antioxidants and Free Radicals

Although this post isn’t hair loss related and it is about an article that is nearly 2 years old, this is an important read for those who buy into the antioxidant solution to anti-aging, heart disease, stroke, cancer, and the like. The question raised here is whether you can get these antioxidants from pills or do you have to get them from fresh fruits and vegetables?

Snippet from the article:

Cranberry capsules. Green tea extract. Effervescent vitamin C. Pomegranate concentrate. Beta carotene. Selenium. Grape seed extract. High-dose vitamin E. Pine bark extract. Bee spit.

You name it, if it’s an antioxidant, we’ll swallow it by the bucket-load. According to some estimates around half the adults in the US take antioxidant pills daily in the belief they promote good health and stave off disease. We have become antioxidant devotees. But are they doing us any good? Evidence gathered over the past few years shows that at best, antioxidant supplements do little or nothing to benefit our health. At worst, they may even have the opposite effect, promoting the very problems they are supposed to stamp out.

Full text at NewScientist — The antioxidant myth: a medical fairy tale

Man killed himself after failed hair transplant

Unfortunately, deforming or failed transplants take a big impact on people so such a story doesn’t sound outrageous. I am aware of three men who committed suicide because of hair loss, so the emotional impact of hair loss can be very severe for many men. Most men who get very emotional about their hair loss, get depression. In the days when the large plugs were put into bald men’s head, their hair transplants were deforming. Prior to the early 1990s, these large deforming plugs had no cure short of a hair system, a common solution for the time period between 1960-1990. Hair systems is something that doesn’t work for everyone but if the deformities were soo bad, a few men were driven to suicide?

Today, with the hair transplant technology commonly available, hair transplants that go wrong can be treated with a success rate of 100%. Men who find themselves in this situation, should seek a modern hair transplant doctor to help manage the deformities and a good family doctor to manage the depression. The good news is that almost 100% of men with hair loss today can get their hair back. Hair transplants are today’s miracle.

See: https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/man-47-killed-himself-after-7724486

Any Solutions for Severe Dandruff?

Dr. Rassman,

For the past 3 to 4 years, i am suffering from severe dandruff. I have also been diagnosed with PCOS last year which is now under control. Mine is long hair and this dandruff is also cyclic. Some times it is perfectly clean and sometimes at its worse. I have used topical products like diprovate with minimal improvement and the shampoos are also not giving the desired result. The dandruff is primarily flaky which is very embarrassing to me. Please suggest me if there is any solution to it. My hair is thinning day by day.

Dandruff may be the sign of a skin disorder like seborrhea, psoriasis, etc. You need to see a good dermatologist and find out if you have some scalp disorder causing what you are seeing and calling dandruff.

How many hairs are in an FUE graft (with photo)

Clearly, there are two factors that are critical to determining the value of an FUE graft. (1) the thickness of the hair shaft itself is important as that reflects to weight of each hair shaft as it is viewed. A fine hair is less weight and less value than a coarse hair as shown in the patient’s magnified view of his donor area as he has coarse hair. I tell my patients that two fine hairs is equal to one medium weight hair and two medium weight hairs is equal to one coarse hair. (2) the numbers of hairs per graft is also critical. This is a racial thing, Caucasians average 2.2 hairs in each follicular unit, while all Asians average 1.6 hairs per follicular unit as do many people from the middle east. The patient’s donor area here measures about 1.6 hairs/follicular unit. He is of Arab decent so that makes him average. In this magnified photo, I tried to circle the number of hairs per follicular unit and put a number on many of them. This is what the surgeon sees when he is doing an FUE under magnification. An FUE removes the follicular unit and each FUE itself is created with a punch and has a wound associated with it.

If you ever read about the number of FUE grafts done in Turkey in the 5000 graft/session range, think about it and then look at the patient below. This patient has less hair density than a Caucasian and the number of grafts per FUE will have less hairs. That means that there will be more wounds created for the FUE with a less hair yield. In this man, if he had 5000 FUE grafts in the back of the head and did not develop necrosis of the wound, he would almost certainly develop a see through donor area (balding in the donor area) something that we are now fixing with Scalp Micropigmentation.


2017-07-14 11:59:05How many hairs are in an FUE graft (with photo)