Losing your locks?
PAROMITA PAIN
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There’s more to hair fall than staring at your bare scalp in the mirror.
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Photo: S.S. Kumar
Get help: There’s no age limit for treatment.
Losing hair is perhaps the only thing that can worry us into losing more precious locks. What encourages jokes like “hair today gone tomorrow”— witty wisecracks that don’t really produce smiles? Is hair just about beauty or do
es it really go deeper? “By the time hair loss becomes visible to the naked eye, you have already lost 50 per cent of hair density. Why wait until then to treat it?” asks Dr. Batra. A homeopath with a specialisation in trichology and India’s first trichologist from the Trichological Society, London, Dr. Batra says there’s more to losing hair than staring at bare scalp in the mirror. Men and women need to take hair fall seriously for it’s more than a cosmetic problem. There are 40 different types of hair loss.
Common problems
Androgenetic Alopecia: “Among adults, particularly men, the most common type is Androgenetic Alopecia, also known as Male Pattern Baldness that typically manifests as a receding hairline and baldness on the crown. It is estimated that it accounts for 95 per cent of all hair loss among men,” he explains.
The process is slow and gradual. Most miss catching it in the crucial initial stages. Dr. Batra recommends a video microscope test to help detect it at the earliest. A painless, non-invasive technique, the video microscope magnifies hair follicles and the scalp up to 200 times and helps detect thinning. It takes just a few minutes to measure hair thickness and density and predict possible hair loss many years before it occurs.
Scalp therapy: Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) is the hormone responsible. Red meat is a DHT activator and aggravates hair loss while green tea and soya are natural DHT inhibitors and so help control hair loss.
Androgenetic Alopecia or Pattern hair loss: This is usually seen in a specific pattern. Ten per cent of men experience this in the early 20s. In women, it may be associated with polycystic ovarian disease, though it’s now common among teenage girls.
Telogen effluvium: This is the result of sudden stress to the body such as prolonged or high fever as a result of malaria, typhoid or Dengue. The patient loses hair in bunches and it can exceed up to 300-400 hair a day.
Scalp therapy: Cut out crash dieting. Today’s fad diets leave the body malnourished, which affects the hair as the first sign. According to a study conducted at Dr. Batra’s Clinic, 60 per cent of women in their reproductive age suffer from hair loss due to anaemia generally brought on by crash diets, irregular eating habits and a desire slim down fast.
Alopecia areata: It is an autoimmune condition where one’s immune system does not allow hair to grow. So the person starts to lose hair in coin-shaped patches, eventually leading to complete loss of hair from the entire body without a single strand anywhere!
Scalp therapy: It can occur at any age group but is seen more commonly in teenagers and young adults. It is often linked to acute emotional stress such as sudden death or separation.
Trichotillomania: Also a stress-related condition generally seen in teenagers and adolescents. Patients tend to pull their hair out and sometimes even eat it. Pulling the hair out seems to bring some temporary relief from stress. This is easy to detect. Right-handed people will pull it out from the right side and the left-handed from the left side. “Depending on the patient’s dominant hand, the thinning can be detected,” he says.
Evaluation
Evaluating the kind of hair fall is important. “We use thorough scientific tools such as the Video, Trichoscan and Woods Lamp. We then try and identify the physical and emotional stressors that could cause the hair loss. Diet and a specific nutritional programme are important to combat problems,” stresses Dr. Batra.
There’s no age to seek treatment for hair fall. If it’s worrying you then do get it checked.
Call 022-28039400 or
or visit www.drbatras.com.
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