Balding Blog

My 5yr old son had a staph infection in his scalp .. It left a bald spot on scalp. My concern is will his hair grow back in that area.

It generally take up to one year to assess if hair will grow back in an area that has been traumatized.

Hi Dr. Rassman, I found this man’s photos with what looks to be a sharp NW2 or mature hairline at age 30, but he and others in the comments believe it will worsen and he’ll “get more bald without finasteride.” I’m asking because I’m 22 and can kind of see my hairline is starting to turn to this sharp shape. So if you had to guess without a haircheck test, what would you say? Mature hairline or MPB? Thanks

The balding pattern if each male is predetermined by genetics. The problem is second guessing it before it starts to become apparent. There is no guarantee that the picture of the man showed will eventually lead to balding. A good doctor building a Master Plan with him and using the tools of trichometry and the HAIRCHECK test might be able to tell before it becomes obvious. That is what I do.

I was thinking about shaving my head but I heard that if I do, it will prevent my hair from growing back. Is this really true?

If your hair has significant miniaturization with hairs that are not growing at this time, then these hairs may not grow back if they are now growing now. Advanced miniaturization of the hairs is often the end stage of hair loss. Other parts of your scalp where there is not end stage miniaturization, will grow back normally. Hairs in the early phase of miniaturization, grow slower than those hairs that are not miniaturized.

If i remove testicles do i gain my hair back and where do they do such operations? Knowing that hair transplant is expensive , with average results and success rate i am trying to know my options

This was done back in the 1920s when identical twins we compared by a psychiatrist. One was a patient in the hospital who had his testicles removed and a full head of hair, the other was his identical twin brother who visited and was bald. When the psychiatrist saw the bald twin on a visit to see his brother, he gave his full headed identical twin a single shot of testosterone and the bald twin lost all of his hair. That should answer your question. Removing your testicles is not a good option and will not restore your hair.

Hi! I recently overplucked 1/4 of top of both my eyebrows and this just happened once but I was just wondering if they will EVER grow back and for how long do I have to wait. I naturally have thick and dark eyebrows. Please help I need your advice.

Only time will tell. Most people will regrow the eyebrows.

Often, men achieve their genetic inherited pattern of hair loss and then stop losing hair. To judge if this is the end point, go back and see if your hair loss pattern has been stable for the past 5 years and if so, this means that you might have reached your inherited hair loss pattern by now

I underwent a MRI of my head about 2 months ago. It lasted 50 minutes and included with and without contrast. It was to confirm the swelling in my eye was thyroid eye disease and not something else. Since this condition started 15 years ago, I was confident if it was anything to be alarmed about I would have known a long time ago. I was not informed about possible hair loss and didn’t know of any real concern with having the MRI, along with being a registered nurse and not wanting to seem non compliant. I went along with having the MRI . Within a couple of weeks of the MRI I started to loose LARGE amounts of hair! This continued for a month! Now I am back to losing the normal amount of hair daily, but I now have a third of the hair I had before the MRI. If I had been informed about the possibility of extreme hair loss ; in my case I would have had the luxury of NOT having the MRI and risking so much hair loss!!!!

The stress that you may have gone through could accelerate hair loss. When the stress abated, everything went back to normal. I don’t believe that the MRI was responsible for your hair loss.

Minoxidil should work on the crown, not sure about the frontal area. Minoxidil will not stop the progression of the frontal balding as finasteride might.

Just out of curiosity, has some experiment been done to move a few miniaturizing grafts over from the top of the head, to the safe zone? To prove that the hair is the issue, not the scalp. I know that hairs from the safe zone can survive on the balding area, so technically the scalp should not be the issue. But who knows, maybe those miniaturizing hairs will survive just fine in the safe zone.

Imagine moving miniaturizing hairs down to the side and moving hair in the safe zone up. Don’t think it would be too difficult test.Just out of curiosity, has some experiment been done to move a few miniaturizing grafts over from the top of the head, to the safe zone? To prove that the hair is the issue, not the scalp. I know that hairs from the safe zone can survive on the balding area, so technically the scalp should not be the issue. But who knows, maybe those miniaturizing hairs will survive just fine in the safe zone.

Imagine moving miniaturizing hairs down to the side and moving hair in the safe zone up. Don’t think it would be too difficult test.

I don’t think that you understand that it is the hair follicles that carry the genetics, not the area where they are placed. I often tell my patients that if you put a donor hair on the end of your nose, it would grow to pony tail length. So using your example, take a miniaturized hair and place it either on the end of the nose or in the donor area, it will still die out according to its genetic clock.