Hair loss in men is obviously very common and also very accepted, however thinning hair in women is also a very major issue. And of course for women their hair is a very important part of how they present themselves to the world, so if it starts to go it can leave the sufferer feeling very embarrassed by it all. Lets have a look at the subject in a bit more detail:
The technical term for female hair loss is androgenetic alopecia and figures for women suffering from this are surprisingly high with approximately one in four women suffering from this in one form or another.So are you actually going bald, well the first place to check would be by getting a better understanding of your hair cycle.
The hair grows in cycles and it works out that at ninety percent of the hair is growing and ten percent is in the resting phase at any one time, during the resting phase it is perfectly normal for you to shed hair. There is one thing you can do to determine if you are losing more hair than is necessary and that is the tug test where you grab about twenty strands of hair between thumb and forefinger and pull them slowly but firmly. If you pull out six or more then you may be suffering from hair loss.
Why do women lose hair? There are a lot of reasons why women can lose their hair. Some are obvious like general poor health, bad diet or stress – but by far and away the biggest factor is likely to be hormonal.There is a hormone called DHT which is thought to be responsible for hair loss. DHT is caused by an excess of testosterone in the body, for men this is a natural occurrence but for women it is a cause of unbalance. The unbalance occurs because normally the estrogen in a woman controls testosterone but if a woman has just had a child or is menopausal then the estrogen level will be low and this can result in DHT and hair loss.
Is there anything that can be done to stop the hair loss? Of course there are the mainstream routes such as drugs from a physician or transplants, however for a majority of people these days that is not the route they want to take as their can be side effects from drugs and transplants can be very expensive. However I do look at alternative ways on my site which is all about how to prevent hair loss at www.howtopreventhairloss.org.
