All that hair you see on your head is dead, you may already know that or you may have just freaked out. Either way, don't worry, it's the same for all of us. The only living part of the hair is the follicle nestled beneath your skin. So, if it's already dead now why do our bodies only lose it when we're older and why on our heads rather than in the places some of us spent hours trying to rid ourselves of it and why when men tend to spend a lot less time torturing it with straightening tongs and bleach than many women seem to do us men normally lose more of it.
We're
talking about alopecia baldness, to you and me, not the type brought
about by the likes of trichotillomania excessive hair pulling or side effects
of medication or autoimmune diseases. The cause of natural alopecia
is found at its root. Okay, so the hair you see is dead, it's essentially just strands
of a protein called keratin bonded together and pushed out of the skin
from the follicle. Incidentally,, it's the bonds that contain sulfur
which that make the smell of burned hair quite so disgusting.
Keratin is also what nails and hooves are
made of that's why hair cuts are physically painless, why horses don't mind
being sued and why you don't mind getting a manicure. Although it feels like
hair grows really slowly, especially for anyone growing out a visually painful
haircut. In fact, hair follicle cells are among the fastest-growing in your
body, that's why chemotherapy causes baldness the treatment targets fast
dividing cells a characteristic of some cancerous tumors, so hair
follicle cells and those inside your gut are always dividing fast
also suffer as a side effect.
Hair
follicles are
pushing out strands of hair at a rate of about 15 centimeters a year
while they are in their allergen or growing phase. And how long
the follicles do this for depends on where on your body they are, for example,
individual hairs on your head could have been growing for anything from two to
six years, then the follicle goes into the catagen stage where it
begins to slow down and stop, and then into the telogen stage which is basically
like a lovely nap. The problem comes when those last two stages start to last
longer and longer, as the ratio of lengths of the three stages changes your
standard 100,000 odd strands of hair aren't replenished quickly enough or are
replenished with smaller strands and you start to lose your hair.
Male
pattern baldness the the most common type of baldness effects are whopping 50% of us men by the
time we're 50, and it feels like such a seemingly unsolvable problem that
as Bill Gates has pointed out, more money is actually currently spent on
trying to cure baldness than on malaria research.
There are scaled
to try and map your own balding status like the Norwood scale here,
which I strongly encourage you to match against your own D follicle ization. Everything
seems to come back to the follicle and what makes it go into that slowing
downstage, well it seems to be down to a whole range of systemic changes
within the body but don't fret we do seem to avert out that since men castrated
at a young age failed to grow beards and suffer less from baldness androgens
hormones that include testosterone they must play a key role. There
seems to be a tricky relationship between hormones and hair growth
rate, they can both excite growth and inhibit it, so how can you combat
baldness other than with a wig or distracting outfit. Well, here are a few
options science has for you.
The first is
a method that works but is pretty time-consuming a hair transplant.
That's essentially transplanting actual hair follicles that are still in
tip-top functioning condition from elsewhere on your body onto your head, but
it's both painstaking and painful. Usually, a 1 centimeter by 15-centimeter strip is removed from the lower back part of the head, and although that might
not sound Humans have around 312 hair follicles per square centimeter,
so that's a lot of hair to remove.
This strip
is then split into two thousand odd separate follicle bulbs and redistributed
across the top of your head, it can take up to ten hours, although thankfully a the robot is being developed who will hopefully we had to do it in half the time.
The second technique
is based on the idea that plucking hairs out might actually stimulate new
growth. Apparently, there's an immune system reaction from the skin around the
area of trauma, the pluck site which then stimulates other hair
follicle interaction. Before you rush to find some tweezers though, please know
guys this has only actually been seen in mice and they have plenty of furs to
spare.
For method 3,
how about something on a more molecular level well. A particular lipid,
which is a compound that behaves a bit like a hormone. Prostaglandin
D2 has been found in heightened levels in the scouts of bald men. Now
maybe that prostaglandin D2 is doing something to inhibit the human hair
follicles from growing. That's exactly what they found in lab conditions.
So, if we
can develop something that blocks the blocker, blocks the prostaglandin D2
receptors, we could be on to a winner.
And finally,
let's go radical. Why not embrace it, if you're only bothered about going bald
because of other people's perceptions of you, then just save what's left off? A
psychological researcher found from polling opinions about photos of
people with full heads of hair, balding heads, and shaved heads, those with
shaved heads were assumed to be more manly and 13% stronger. And an
average is seen as nearly an inch taller. I think the sales of razors may jump
after that news spreads, to be honest.
Oh before I
go, it's worth remembering that you have actually already gone bald once before
in your lifetime.
While you're
in the womb, you had a thick layer of white downy hair all over your body. This
lanugo layer is shed at about eight months into the pregnancy and it generally
gets consumed by the baby too.
so let's face it, you got over it once you can
do it again.
I believe in
you.
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