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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