Displaying items by tag: hair loss study

REPORT: Researchers Grow Fully Functional Skin (With Hair!)

Skin can do a lot of things, but one thing it can do especially well is simply grow. Every month our body fully replaces its skin, and there are close to 19 million skin cells an inch! But in the lab, this has been difficult to repeat. However, recently, some Japanese scientists grew functional skin tissue, and they were able to transplant it onto living organisms.

This technique has only been tested on mice. However, in the future, it could change things for victims of burns or for people who have undergone skin damage of a catastrophic nature. And also, less severely perhaps, this skin growth could be used to treat male pattern baldness, which many men experience as they get older.

The researchers in Japan who worked with mice to create skin were able to implant it into the gums of mice to build clusters, some of which looked like a growing embryo. They chose mice that had a fully functioning immune system, just to make sure that they would accept the transplant. This is a huge step forward.

As skin is one of the largest--and most important--organs in the body, it's also difficult to treat it well when it's been damaged. So far, they've come up with skin grafts (which can be painful) and artificial skin (which is far from ideal). The skin grown in the lab shows that this new skin can be made with hair follicles and sweat glands, enabling it to stay moisturized and control temperatures.

Now, this can help with skin repair, but it can also help with baldness. After the mice received the skin implants, they began growing hair, which shows that the skin implanted is capable of doing the same for a person, too. It's perfectly possible that this type of skin implant could be used to aid men who have male-pattern baldness, and this is not too far off in the future.

While the technique is still about 5 or 10 years off, relatively speaking, that's not too far away. But since 95 percent of men and 50 percent of women suffer from baldness at some point, this is something that is likely to be popular when it is made public.

Caffeine Can halt hair loss, says German scientist

Caffeine has long been known as a stimulant. However, it is able to perk up more than just you after a long day of work or as you drag throughout the long afternoon hours. Many facial skin products include caffeine in order to help give that nice, natural, chemical boost to your skin and help perk it up. Shouldn't there be other elements to your body that are able to respond to the natural elements of caffeine?

According to German scientists, it can. Hair loss is mostly based on genetics, but there are ways to slow it down and even stop it. As the hair follicles begin to thin and slow down in production, what many of these follicles need is a bump of energy to boost production and to halt the slow down. If what the German researchers have to say is true, caffeine might just be the perfect, natural ingredient to do this for you.

There are a few different ingredients that are known to help stimulate the body. One is niacin. This is a B-vitamin. It is used to increase energy and to offer individuals a burst of endurance. In fact, the German researchers first looked at how athletes would use the elements found in caffeine for doping means. They believed that if the drug could be used to artificially enhance a person's body to improve athletic performances, it should be able to boost hair and its ability to grow.

The hair is a tissue/organ that has a very high energy demand. It, along with nails, requires a significant amount of energy to grow. It is why hair and nails are often the first elements of a person's body to suffer when they are not absorbing enough nutrients and energy during the day. The German researches pointed out that the roots of hair require 10 times the amount of energy to grow during the growth period than during the resting period (all hair grows in phases, as some hair follicles lay dormant for months at a time. So, the research look towards including caffeine into the root system of the head in order to add this necessary energy to the hair roots.

The growth is a long term process as it does take a while for the roots to begin to show the increased energy from the roots. This includes a continual development and connection with the caffeine, which takes around six to eight months.

Reverse Baldness By Blocking Enzymes

With all of the scientific advances that the medical community has been making lately, it is somewhat surprising that there hasn't been much of a focus on one of the most common issues for men and women—hair loss. For many people, hair loss can be devastating. It can affect everything from work prospects to romantic self-confidence. Finally, however, it seems like science is catching on and doing some research about how to prevent this problem.

Some exciting new discoveries have been made when it comes to hair loss, and although the experiments have only been done with mice, the results are extremely promising. Researchers from the University of Columbia set out to discover what happens when the JAK enzyme is blocked with a drug. When applied to the mice's skin, they were surprised to see that the drug caused rapid hair growth, even reawakening old follicles that were thought to be out of service.

So, what's the implication for human beings? Well, researchers are still working on that. They've tested human hair follicles and so far it appears as though the mechanism does function in the same manner for human hair. In a laboratory setting, the human hair follicles reached the same way. Whether or not this will work outside of a lab setting remains to be seen, but the results are extremely promising. Although a practical drug—that blocks the JAK enzyme to treat hair loss—may be off in the distance, it seems as though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration might take into account some other JAK-blocking drugs it has already approved. For instance, Tofacitinib (an arthritis drug) and Ruxolitinib (a blood disease drug) both block JAK and are already on the market.

Still, more tests need to take place in order to determine whether or not such a drug would work for people in the real world. But for the millions of people across the world who suffer from hair loss, these findings provide something that many of them haven't had for years—the hope that they can abandon more artificial fixes and that their natural hair will grow back.