Category: Uncategorized

I’m only 18 and just wondering if my hair looks like it’s starting to recede or not. I know I have my dads hairline but my dad is bald and that does creep in my head sometimes as he started balding in his 20s. Both my grandfathers have most of their hair. And my uncles on my moms side all mostly have their hair and my dad has no brothers. When I style or just do my hair, it’s never noticeable and I always get compliments on my hair and its thickness. So does it look like it’s receding or could this just be a normal hairline? It also bothers me that the right side of my hairline has a little more hair.

With your family history and some early frontal hair loss, you should be concerned about progressive hair loss. Your biggest enemy is progressive thinning leading to a balding pattern that is not evident at this point in time. The degree of thinning that you are experiencing suggests that you should see a doctor who most likely perform a Bulk Measurement of your hair to determine the degree of the thinning that you are presently having.

If the diagnosis is early genetic hair loss, the most common cause of hair loss in young men, then the best treatment is the drug Finasteride. This medication is highly effective in men of your age and may not only stop the hair loss but possibly reverse it. If you are developing a more advanced balding pattern, the best test to get is the Bulk Measurement. This will show, over a one-year time frame, how effective the treatment will be. Once you know this information, then you and your doctor need to develop a MASTER PLAN which will define what you need to do in the years to come.

Check out my video. In it I talk about donor hair supply and bulk measurements.

Early hair loss in an 18 year-old.

I’m 18 and I lost part of my frontal hairline. Am I too late to start taking Finasteride?

For an 18 year-old with early frontal hair loss, it is the right timing for the drug Finasteride. The drug works best in young men and may even reverse the hair loss provided that what you are seeing is not a maturing hairline. A maturing hairline will not be affected by Finasteride. Your doctor will tell you if this is a maturing hairline or not. See here for pictures of a mature hairline: https://baldingblog.com/2007/01/12/maturization-of-a-hairline-moving-from-juvenile-to-mature-with-photos/

Conditioning your hair is valuable if you are losing it from genetic balding because when you comb it, you want the comb or brush to slide through the hair and not pull on the miniaturized hair. Miniaturized hairs are fragile, and rough brushing or styling of your hair without conditioner is not a good idea. I always recommend that my patient used a wide-toothed brush when combing because it doesn’t pull on the hair at the root.

I’ve been reading more of the news items about yesterday’s publication of the two studies in Nature Genetics, and pulled some key quotes from various news sites that are worth highlighting.

From the BBC —

“Analysis of DNA from 5,000 volunteers with and without male-pattern baldness found two stretches of the genome linked with the condition.”

“One was the androgen receptor gene and has already been linked to male-pattern baldness. The other region is on chromosome 20 and is nowhere near any known gene.”

We’ve long known that genes were responsible for hair loss, but now they’ve finally been identified.

—

From the Scotsman —

“Until now, the only known genetic link with male baldness was on the female chromosome, meaning it could be passed down to men from their mother’s father.”

“Dr Richards said so far they had only identified a cause of hair loss.”

In other words, the cure isn’t here and this is still the very early stage, so don’t cancel your hair transplant just yet.

—

From the Wall Street Journal —

But dermatologists say that looking at hair shafts under a microscope can spot shrinkage years before it’s apparent. “We can pick it up when kids are teenagers,” says Robert Bernstein, founder of Bernstein Medical Center for Hair Restoration, a treatment clinic in New York. He agrees that medication can slow hair loss only if it isn’t too advanced. Once an area is devoid of hair, only a transplant can restore it.

This is what I’ve been talking about all along — mapping your scalp for miniaturization.

Men always worry about hair loss and young men are hung up on the 3-4% risk of sexual side effects of the drug finasteride; but form time to time we see the huge impact of this drug on hair loss reversal in young men as shown in this photos of a young man on the drug for 2 years. Many doctors are now not prescribing this drug for fear of being involved in the Class Action law suits brought by men who are suing the drug company Merck as they fell that they are part of the 3-4% of those with sexual side effects. Nevertheless, here are the pictures I am referring to.

I am a 20 year old male and I want to discuss about hair transplant. I Started noticing hairloss since around age 19 and since then I have been using rogaine to help me with it(about 7 months now), I have also just started finasteride a month ago. Although I only have a small amount of recession, I want to get a small hair transplant done so that my hairline looks good. I am a model/actor hence I am in front of the camera a lot and I need to keep my hair looking good in order to maintain a few of my upcoming roles. After doing a bit of research I came across the fact that hair transplant is usually done on people above the age of 25. But I am fine with getting it done two or even three times in the next decade as long as I can keep my hair! I also think it is worth mentioning that money is not an issue for me in the sense that having good hair would be an indirect investment into my career. What would you advise me?

Please look at these pictures: https://baldingblog.com/need-master-plan-think-hair-transplants-photos/ and see the need for a Personalized Master Plan that will not include a hair transplant until you are at least 25. This is clear because your balding will change and if you use us your donor hair now, then you might end up without enough to follow your future balding pattern.

Snippet from the article:

Stand up straight! And do something about that hair!” Annoying? Sure. But such parental advice may have made humans what we are today. Because our upright stance, and relative lack of hair, may have enabled our human ancestors to run far and fast enough to capture their prey. So say scientists in the Journal of Human Evolution.

The idea that standing on two legs and shedding all that body hair might have helped early humans keep cool on the African savanna was first trotted out in the late 1980s. But those early models had our ancestors standing still in a gentle breeze. Scientists simply didn’t have the computational power to assess what might happen when those early humans had to up and chase down a meal.

Read the rest — Upright and Hairless Make Better Long-Distance Hunters

The above article is actually a transcript of a podcast. The published model can be found here.