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Dr. Rassman,

I have been a patient of yours for over three years now and I recently visited your office back in August. After seeing you again it was established that my hair loss had not progressed from last year and had possibly even improved. Unfortunately, over the past month, I have been experiencing non characteristic loss. When I am in the shower, I have never ending clumps of hair coming of my head and clogging the drain. Also, when brushing my hair there is even more loss. Dr. Rassman, this has never happened before and I have no idea what to do. Is it possible that the Propecia that I have been taking since November of 2005 has stopped working for me and my genes are taking over?

All of the loss has been occurring since I have been out of town on a job. I seem to even have some kind of infection on the corners of my lips. I am sure the two things are not related, but I figured I would tell you.

Anyway, is this a normal experience for someone on the drug as long as I have been? Should I take more of it? Is it possible for a person to lose all of his hair immediately? Could this be a possible hair cycle or allergy? Again, I have no idea what to do and what to expect. I appreciate you taking the time to read this and your advice/help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you and looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Hair loss can increase from stress amongst many other things, such as the normal progression of hair loss that occurs in some men (even those on Propecia). As one of my patients, please come see me and let me see if your miniaturization has increased. We can get a baseline on the HAIRCHECK instrument by measuring your hair bulk now and then repeat it in a year to see, for future purposes, if you are continuing to lose your hair.

Includes snippets from Wall Street Journal Article: Crucial to the hair-growth and balding process, scientists have found, vitamin D and the microscopic receptors that bind to it in skin as essential to good hair growth. These elements have become the focus for several research teams. (Supplements might offer health benefits for people lacking enough vitamin D, but they won’t bring back lost hair, researchers say.)

Some researchers, including those from the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, have identified molecules besides vitamin D that appear to activate the receptor and hold potential for future hair loss treatments. Japanese researchers demonstrated in animals that adding vitamin D helped the process of using stem cells to generate new follicles. Found in the Wall Street Journal — The Search for a Baldness Cure

My friend Dr. Richard Shiell commented:

“Plenty of sunlight and Vit D here in Australia (world’s highest rate of skin cancer). From my observation, our baldness rate and pattern-type is pretty much the same as elsewhere.

We are seeing Vit D deficiency in some Muslim women and children who cover-op and do not take advantage of our sunlight. I have not heard of any increase in hair loss. Kids at the beach these days are covered from head to knee as in the Victorian era so, if the author is correct, we should see more baldness in the future. I don’t believe it.”

It’s important to highlight the sentence from the article that states: “Supplements might offer health benefits for people lacking enough vitamin D, but they won’t bring back lost hair“.

In response to this news, some hair restoration doctors stated that they often recommend vitamin D as part of the treatment for women with balding or thinning hair. There does not seem to be a downside to this use, but I wouldn’t get too excited just yet about calling this a “cure”.

Tags: vitamin d, hairloss, hair loss, wsj

The neck hair is not permanent hair so as this man gets older, he may see his neck hair disappear and so will these grafts in the recipient area that came from the neck because these hairs ‘don’t know’ that they are not in his neck.

These photos are great. They show that you don’t need to have surgery to get great results, if you have the type of balding that responds to these medications.

I Got My Hair Back, Got Lazy And Now Back To Square One from tressless

Hi Dr. Rassman,

First off, I would like to say you have an excellent site here and it has been the source of many of my answers while I suffered with my paranoia of hairloss.

I wanted to ask about a type of hairloss I noticed while talking to a person. The man exhibited diffuse baldness and was almost completely bald on top however all over the top of his head he had a few thick hairs that were buzzed down. All the hairs that I could see were all thick. Also, his hairline was completely unharmed. It was covered in thick hairs from left to right. I was wondering if this is normal MPB or not since from my understanding in the diffuse form of MPB, all the hairs slowly thin out on top of the head. I know it is normal to see some thick hairs among thin hairs in someone who’s going bald, but this guy had only thick hairs on top of his head.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Some men who bald can have a persistent frontal hairline. Some never go bald in the front. These are a few exceptions to the classic Norwood patterns. You can also have thick (non miniaturized) hairs on balding areas. It is just that the proportion of thick to thin are different.

I’m a 20 year old with a question about balding and family genetics. I have a maternal grandfather who is is almost in his 80s who has a huge full head of hair, and a father who is bald. What are my chances of going bald?

There’s no telling. The balding gene can come from the maternal or paternal side and can skip generations. There’s no easy predictor just by looking at the family history, but with your father’s baldness, you do have some risk.

Dr. William Davis wrote this book and believes that probiotics will help you in many ways, including hair loss. One caution that he discusses is probiotics will increase testosterone. I know from years of experience that increasing testosterone will increase hair loss and not the other way. Many people who write about diet, don’t focus on the nuances of hair loss and connections like impact on testosterone levels. Just a thought!

By law, only physicians are performing hair transplant surgery in the US and most European and Asian countries. Necrosis is a terrible complication of a hair transplant and necrosis reflects some lack of understanding of anesthesia and/or technique in the surgery. In the 16,000+ surgeries my group has done over the past 29 years, we never had a case of necrosis

The diagnosis of Diffuse Unpatterned Alopecia (something I defined in the medical literature) can be made with a hand microscope which shows an abnormal amount of miniaturization in the sides and back. I think that you need to have such an examination