Why Am I Losing So Much Hair
… Continued …
Alopecia areata! It’s an autoimmune disorder in which the body immune system goes awry and often causes hair follicles to shrink suddenly (acute).
Not only hairs from the scalp, this abnormality thing may also affect hairs from your eyelashes and eyebrows. The disease also affects the skin, causing skin problems such as a butterfly-shaped rash and the skin becomes more sensitive to the sun.
Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, a hormonal disorder affecting women. It affects about 5 million women in the U.S [9]! And it usually affects women of childbearing age. Even sometimes it can affect them as early as age 11.
With this disorder, the ovaries go awry by producing a lot of male hormones (much greater than normal). It may cause overproduction of androgen, a hormone that can worsen pattern hair loss (androgenic alopecia).
It may also lead to other sorts of bad things such as increased risk of cysts on the ovaries, irregular periods, acne flare-ups, or excess facial hair growth.
Cancer! For example, hair loss is pretty common in patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. However in most cases of cancer, chemotherapy and other cancer treatments are the primary cause.
That’s because cancer treatments are designed to target the rapidly growing cancerous cells. Unfortunately, the treatment (chemotherapy most likely to blame) may also affect other non-cancerous fast growing cells such as your hair’s cells.
Hair loss associated with cancer treatment is usually not permanent. The problem is less likely to become irreversible, though it’s also possible that the affected area remains thin. Most of the time, the affected hair will regrow normally.
Eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia! These can drive you to follow extreme weight loss diet since you’re heavily dependent on your body image.
Both anorexia and bulimia can cause similar symptoms, the primary one is distorted body weight and body image. Is there any difference? In general, they are different on food-related behaviors.
People with bulimia can sometimes eat a lot of foods in short period of time, but then they purge it extremely or follow other methods to prevent weight gain. In anorexia, people often severely reduce what they eat in order to keep the body thin (much thinner than normal).
These abnormal eating behaviors not only stress your body, but also are likely to cause hair loss since you’re going to have malnutrition and divert necessary nutrients for your hair growth!
Now you know that there are many factors and conditions that contribute to cause the problem, just like the strands are departing en masse. Although hair loss could be a signal of certain medical condition, many times it is a medically inconsequential thing (treatment is usually just for cosmetic reasons).
However it’s also hard to resist that hair loss could cause depression, especially in women. Whatever it is, (for more guidance) see a dermatologist if you’re convinced something is going wrong!
