Hair Loss Medicine

Men have been seeking an ultimate cure for baldness for thousands of years but until very recently all available cures were either cosmetic cover-ups or vitamin/mineral pills and herbal lotions, with too many of them just being scams. It was only with the advent of minoxidil and finasteride and improvements made in hair transplantation techniques in recent twenty years that the new era began, enabling hair loss sufferers to halt the further progression of the balding process and replace the missing hair on top of their head using the hair left at the back of their scalp. However, to this day no ultimate cure for hair loss exists.

There are presently several promising drugs and new surgical techniques under development but none of these new therapies is expected to hit the market before 2012.

NEOSH101 is being developed by the US firm Neosil and it is currently undergoing phase IIb clinical testing. NEOSH101 has been proven to be a more powerful and faster-acting hair growth stimulant than minoxidil and it only needs applying once daily. Although significantly improving the current hair loss treatment options, NEOSH101 is not believed to become an ultimate cure for baldness. The clinical trials seem to be advancing slower than most hair loss sufferers would like to see and, hence, do not hold your breath for it hitting the market anytime soon. NEOSH101 is mainly expected to replace minoxidil as the most powerful hair growth stimulant today.

Another promising area of development is the telomerase research. Telomerase is an enzyme that is able to place natural caps on telomeres and thus protect them from shortening. Telomerase thereby maintains the genomic integrity. Shortened telomeres are associated with the premature aging processes. However, the uncontrolled activation of telomerase can cause cancer. Cancer research is the main focal point of the telomerase study but scientists are also examining other possible applications, such as anti-aging drugs and drugs against baldness and grey hair. Although still under development, there are already some products available on the market that seek to mimic the mechanism of telomerase action but they have no scientific backing and should be avoided. Telomerase research could really change the world of medicine but its commercial application might be a good decade away.

Hair multiplication, often called hair cloning, is the next hopeful treatment option being currently developed. This technique involves extracting the hair follicles from the back of the patient’s scalp, culturing and multiplying them and injecting the newly-grown hair cells into the bald scalp. Among several teams of scientists researching hair multiplication, the UK healthcare firm Intercytex appears to be the frontrunner. Intercytex reported results of the latest stage of the clinical phase II study of ICX-TRC (a suspension of a patient’s own dermal papilla cells) in March 2008 and they were largely positive. The next release was expected for September 2008 but it has not been released yet. This therapy might hit the market in 2012 at the earliest. The main benefit of hair multiplication would be ensuring the supply of donor hair, shortage of which is the main limiting factor in hair transplantation.

Generating new hair follicles from wounds in hair-free skin is a completely new approach to regrowing hair. It was discovered accidentally as wounded skin in mice started growing new hair. This technology is currently being developed by the US medical device company, Follica, which licensed this technology from the University of Pennsylvania. Though this method may sound weird it only uses common instruments and drugs that have already been medically approved and thus it might not take too long for it to become commercially available.

This is the list of several promising treatments for baldness that are being currently developed but there are some more in the pipeline. It seems that becoming bald will soon be by choice rather than destiny.

In the first place, the hair loss treatment options can be divided into surgical and non-surgical therapies. Although there are only a few surgical techniques used these days, the non-surgical spectrum is wide and confusing. There seem to be tons of non-surgical treatment options available to those who wish to avoid hair surgery. Propecia and Rogaine might be the best known medicinal hair loss treatments, while dried fruits of saw palmetto and a Chinese herb, He Shou Wu, also known as Fo-Ti, are the natural ingredients most frequently used in alternative hair loss remedies.

The non-surgical, hair restoration therapies can be broken down into medicinal and alternative treatments, whereas when considering methods of application, they can be divided into oral treatments, topicals and others, such as LaserComb. Irrespective of the aforementioned breakdowns, hair growth treatments work either by blocking the activity of dihydrotestosterone, also called antinandrogens, or by stimulating hair growth. Some treatments claim to work by different other modes of action such as nourishing the hair follicles or cleaning the scalp but such claims sound quite anecdotal.

Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) is a biologically-active metabolite of the male hormone testosterone that is held to be the main culprit causing both, male and female hereditary pattern baldness. Harmful effects of DHT lead to hair miniaturisation as the hair becomes finer and thinner with every new hair growth cycle until the hair follicles refuse to produce another hair at all. The exact mechanism by which DHT acts on hair follicles is not known, though. Medicinal drug finasteride, better known under its trade name Propecia, is the only clinically-proven and FDA-approved antiandrogen used for treating male pattern baldness. It acts by preventing the creation of DHT in the scalp. Since the introduction of Propecia, numerous other drugs and natural therapies have emerged claiming antiandrogen activity and positive influence on hair growth. Some of them are supposed to work by a different mode of action than Propecia, such as preventing DHT from binding to the receptor sites in the follicle or blocking activity in the androgen receptor itself.

A potassium channel opener - minoxidil, also known under its trade name Rogaine, is the best-known hair loss medicine amongst hair growth stimulants. It is assumed that hair growth stimulants work by directly stimulating epithelial growth of hair follicles and some of them may also counteract the hardening of the hair follicles but the exact mechanism of their action has never been described. One thing that all hair growth stimulants have in common is their ability to increase the length of the hair growth cycle, thus improving the ratio of hair in the growth phase versus those in the resting phase and to increase the hair’s diameter.

The natural hair loss treatments are in principle assumed to work by the aforementioned modes of action and are often described as safe alternatives to medicinal treatments. There are not too many hair loss treatments out there that have been clinically proven and independently verified to be effective in treating baldness. Of those few existing, all happen to be medicinal drugs. Natural hair loss treatments have still to live up to their promoter’s claims.

Despite the great variety of available remedies, meaningful hair loss treatment options seem to be relatively few. When deciding about the most suitable hair loss treatment option, one should consider approaching the problem from different angles. It is best advised to use a combination of antiandrogen and hair growth stimulant, such as a Propecia/Rogaine combo. Alternative, hair loss treatments, for instance natural remedies, should mainly be considered as a method of fine-tuning this basic regimen in order to achieve additional benefits.