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Medicanet 
Hair Loss |
Hair LossGlobal hair loss or baldness in males has multifactorial etiologies.
Poverty, malnutrition, unhealthy lifestyles and hereditary reasons and environmental hazards play a significant role as causal factors of hair loss in males.
Hair loss is the most common condition among males and carries with it the highest rate of all hereditary conditions affecting this sex. Male baldness is rare in women, but when it does occur, it is usually not recognized, until late, and thus the results of treatment baldness are poor.
Hair loss appears to have reached epidemic levels. Talk to any group of people anywhere in the world and they all seem to have some experience of it–someone in their family, a friend, a neighbour or work colleague.
And it is not just a vague impression that this is the case, there are hard statistics to back it up. Every year around 39 000 women and between 200 and 300 men are diagnosed with hair loss or baldness. Government figures show that the number of people who develop hair loss or baldness every year has increased by 70 per cent since 1971, and by 15 per cent in the ten years to 2000.
While history, physical examination, and surgical procedures may strongly suggest treatment for baldness, the diagnosis can be made only by microscopic examination of hair tissue removed. Male baldness appears long after the hair finishes its development. Age is associated with the location of the hair loss.
The area of the male body where hair loss originated was more central in the older male patient population we studied.
Hair loss probably originates in the head with a time relationship between the genes and male baldness. It is surprising that hair loss does not originate in the head, which usually initiate and grow in regenerating or rapidly developing hair.
It is rare for male baldness to develop before the age of 24. This is exactly the time when normal hair growth starts in most males. Hair growth is well known to clinicians and is a normal aging process.
The development of male baldness argues that susceptibility to hair loss is probably created much earlier in life.
Many, if not most, ailments of the body cause pain and this includes male baldness. Hair loss syndromes can result from the progression of the condition or from efforts to cure or control the condition. The sense organs for pain are the naked nerve endings found in almost every hair tissue of the body. Pain has been classified into two major types: fast pain and slow pain. Fast pain is felt within about 0.1 second after a pain stimulus is applied, whereas slow pain begins only after 1 second or more and then increases slowly over many seconds and sometimes even minutes.
Male baldness presents a type of slow or chronic pain. This pain largely results from over-stimulation of nerve endings in the hair. The nerve endings may be stimulated by inflammatory substances that are produced by damaged cells from the hair loss and released from the surrounding capillary network. |
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