Womens Hair Loss Explained

Although more likely found in men, female hair loss is quite a common problem too, and if hair loss for men can cause self consciousness you can multiply that a 100 times when it come to thinning hair in women. So what is behind it and what can be done about it?

Another name for female hair loss is androgenetic alopecia, and it is more common than you may have previously thought with approximate numbers being about 1 in 4 women suffering from thinning hair. So are you actually going bald, well the first place to check would be by getting a better understanding of your hair cycle.

The hair grows in cycles and it works out that at ninety percent of the hair is growing and ten percent is in the resting phase at any one time, during the resting phase it is perfectly normal for you to shed hair. You can always do a test to see if you are losing more hair than you should be and that is by getting say twenty strands of hair between thumb and forefinger and then slowly but firmly tug them. If half a dozen or more come out then that is a sign you may be losing your hair.

So what causes hair loss in women? Well there can be many factors including things like stress or diet, but probably the biggest one is hormonal.There is a hormone called DHT which is thought to be responsible for hair loss. DHT is caused by an excess of testosterone in the body, for men this is a natural occurrence but for women it is a cause of unbalance. The unbalance occurs because normally the estrogen in a woman controls testosterone but if a woman has just had a child or is menopausal then the estrogen level will be low and this can result in DHT and hair loss.

Is there anything that can be done to stop the hair loss? Of course there are the mainstream routes such as drugs from a physician or transplants, however for a majority of people these days that is not the route they want to take as their can be side effects from drugs and transplants can be very expensive. However I do look at alternative ways on a site which is all about how to prevent hair loss at www.howtopreventhairloss.org.