It is estimated there are between 100,000 to 150,000 hairs on human beings’ heads. Of these, 40 to 100 hairs are lost each day, which are replaced by new ones grown from the hair follicles. The causes of hair loss, or alopecia, as it is medically known, are often genetic. But there are other causes, too. Among them are medications and treatments, such as chemotherapy, that altar the body’s hormonal balance. Stress, injury to the scalp and physical stretching of the hair can also be factors.
By age 50, pattern baldness affects half the male population and a quarter of the women. Corrective treatments range from the “cure all” patent medicines sold from pitchmen’s wagons to corticosteroids to surgery, in which small patches of skin containing hair follicles are removed from the back and sides of the head and transplanted to those areas where hair loss is apparent.
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Concurrent with the research being done at USC, a variety of studies into the regeneration of human hair is under way. One is at the Yale University School of Medicine under the guidance of Dr. Valerie Horsley, associate professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, who expressed continuing interest in the research being done by Drs. Chuong and Lei. She is, she says, “excited by the work” being done at USC and looks forward to further results.
Another study has been led by Dr. Alexey Terskikh at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, California, in which human pluripotent stem cells taken from human embryos and fetal tissue were engineered to become dermal papilla cells, governing the formation of hair follicles and the hair-growth cycle.
— By Ray Sipherd, special to CNBC.com
