Dieting is blamed for the growing number of young women experiencing hair loss, but the most common reason for baldness is genetic. Photograph by : Elaina Aponte, Reuters

EDMONTON - Morgan hides her secret under a hat. Only her family, closest friends, hairstylist and dermatologist know that the 55-year-old businesswoman is battling baldness. And she's not alone.

Hair loss is so synonymous with men some people might be shocked to find that it's a problem for almost as many women -- 30 million in North America compared with 40 million men. It's not as visible with women thanks to estrogen, which prevents total hair loss. Women also don't suffer from receding hairlines the way men do because of an enzyme called aromatase, which changes male hormones in women into female hormones.

Most women experience hair loss at the back of their heads, so unless a passerby looks back or is walking behind a woman with thinning hair they won't see it, says dermatologist Dr. Janice Liao, who specializes in restoring hair lost by both sexes. If you do notice a balding woman in public, she's usually older, but Dr. Liao has patients in their late teens and early 20s and 30s. The clumps of hair this age group typically lose are a result of not eating properly.

"Women, unfortunately, like to go on diets, especially crash diets, and if you starve yourself, don't eat lots of iron and protein, you lose your hair," Dr. Liao says, noting it's the same thing with eating disorders. Dr. Liao explains that while a woman thinks of her hair as her crowning glory, her body considers it to be an accessory organ. So whatever a woman eats first goes to repair the parts the body thinks are more important and last, to hair.

Improving your diet will help restore hair growth in such cases, but because the body has to first replenish depleted nutrient levels, and scalpel hair grows less than an inch per month, it can take about six months to recover thinning or balding areas, Dr. Liao says.

While dieting is behind the growing numbers of young women experiencing hair loss these days, the most common reason for female pattern baldness is genetic. If your mother, father, uncle or grandparent is bald, the more likely it is that you will be too, Dr. Liao says.

Autoimmune related diseases are also linked to hair loss, which is believed to be the cause of Morgan's hair loss, which started when she was 27 years old.

"I'd be brushing my hair and all of a sudden I'd discover a bald spot the size of a quarter. I don't know when it came out, maybe in the shower, but I never noticed any excessive hair loss on my pillowcase," Morgan says. (The odds of finding a woman who is trying to hide her hair loss to share her secret publicly are slim to none, so Morgan is not her real name.)

Her doctor said the hair loss was likely due to stress, another common cause of alopecia, the medical term for baldness, but Morgan says she wasn't under any stress.

She was then referred to a dermatologist who diagnosed her with alopecia areata, a highly unpredictable, autoimmune skin disease that mistakenly attacks a person's own immune system (white blood cells), resulting in the arrest of hair growth.

"It comes and goes in my life," says Morgan, who has been battling her latest bout with baldness for about a year. "I'll have a full head of hair for two years and then it just comes back, and it can come back in a spotty way or just in one spot."

All these years later, it's still traumatic when the spots reappear, she says.

Her doctor, Dr. Liao, injects steroids to the affected areas to trigger hair growth, and Morgan considers herself quite lucky that she always gets some regrowth and it fills in quickly.

Although almost as many women as men experience hair loss, 80% of Dr. Liao's patients are male. The doctor suspects it's because many women suffer with the problem unaware that anything can be done about it.

There's a treatment for about every balding woman, including hair plugs and birth control pills, even if the cause is genetic, Dr. Liao says.

The one group of patients she has trouble helping are vegans, who are prone to hair loss but are unwilling to give up their meatless and dairy-free diets to save their falling locks.

For everyone else, the secret to hair restoration is to seek treatment before too much time goes by and the hair loss becomes permanent, Dr. Liao says.

Signs that you may be balding include a hair part that appears to be getting wider and a daily loss of more than 50 to 100 scalpel hairs, which is the norm.

FOLLICLE FACTS

CAUSES OF HAIR LOSS
- Antidepressants; a lot of medications such as beta blockers; high blood pressure; thyroid problems; ageing.

NORMAL HAIR LOSS
- After a woman goes off birth control pills; from up to six months after a woman has had a baby; five to six months after surgery while the body focuses on healing the surgical site.

HAIR LOSS STATISTICS
- The average person has about 100,000 hairs on the scalp.
- You need to lose about 50% of your hair before hair loss becomes noticeable.
- It is normal to lose 50-100 hairs from the head each day.
- Scalp hair grows at a rate of one cm (3/4 inch) a month.
- Each hair on the head grows for four to seven years before being shed.

Source: http://www.nationalpost.com

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