About one out of three women experience hair loss (alopecia) at some time in their lives; whereas amongst the postmenopausal women, as many as 67% of them suffer from hair thinning or bald spots. Hair loss in women often has a bigger impact than hair loss does on men, as it’s less socially acceptable for women to appear with little hair. Alopecia can severely affect a woman’s emotional well-being and confidence if not treated in time and with appropriate treatment.
According to WebMD, male pattern baldness appears in a telltale shape: you will see a receding hairline with thinning strands around the crown of your head. Over time, more and more hair will drop and that area will go bald, but you’ll still have a horseshoe pattern of hair above your ears circling to the lower back of the head – which makes it common sight in males across the age of 40s.
Research from Harvard Medical School shows that for both men or women, hair loss from androgenetic alopecia occurs due to a genetically determined shortening of anagen, a hair’s growing phase, and a lengthening of the time between the shedding of a hair and the start of a new anagen phase. What does this means? It means it takes longer for hair to start growing back after it is shed in the course of the normal growth cycle. The hair follicle itself also changes, shrinking and producing a shorter, thinner hair shaft — a process called “follicular miniaturization.” As a result, thicker, pigmented, longer-lived “terminal” hairs are replaced by shorter, thinner, non-pigmented hairs called “vellus.”