Name: Why is there no cure for hair loss? | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2020-04-23T04:40:18.000Z
Duration: 4 min 27 s
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Every year, people spend about $8.5 billion on treatments for hair loss.

Adverbs of degree

and it speaks to how deeply people are affected by it,

and how badly they would like for there to be a cure.

there's no treatment that actually regrows large amounts of hair.

A new treatment for baldness may be on the way.

I'm interested in the subject, obviously.

The drug was applied regularly and new hair began to sprout.

A cure for baldness might be the most perpetually delayed

of all the medical advances we're told are just around the corner.

Now there are a few prospective treatments that are very promising,

But first, it's good to examine why exactly

and how, over time, hype has often played a bigger role than science

So the first thing is hair itself is pretty simple,

it's just dead cells stuffed with a protein.

But the follicles that make hair are incredibly complex.

They're technically an organ like your heart or your kidneys.

that form early in your development and they can never be regrown.

a foetus already has all five million of the hair follicles

and the hair that these follicles make can change,

like how it gets thicker and darker during puberty.

Now in terms of treatments, even back in the 1950s, 60s and 70s

when we didn't know very much about how hair worked,

Experiments carried out on monkeys are said to be encouraging.

Testosterone injections, or have steroids rubbed on your scalp,

or vacuuming on the skin where the hair was supposed to grow.

There was even a Japanese pharmaceutical company

that marketed a CD of music that was supposed to promote hair growth.

There were so many fraudulent cures that, in the mid-1980s,

the American Food and Drug Administration

actually banned any medication that claimed to treat hair loss.

Now some real treatments were actually found

but the thing was, they came about almost entirely by accident.

Experiments which may produce the world's first real baldness cure.

Doctors administering a new drug for treating patients

with high blood pressure found interesting side effects.

A side effect of that medication was it grew hair on people.

It was a nuisance. It grew bushy eyebrows and heavy body hair.

And then a drug for enlarged prostate called Finasteride

was shown to slow down or halt hair loss in some people.

The drugs didn't actually regrow full heads of hair,

but they were incredibly big news at the time.

and I think people thought that they were the first step

that they didn't follow from any big revelation in medical science.

Basically, we have a treatment for a process

that have ever been approved for hair loss.

Since the 1990s, even though we haven't found any new drugs,

we've learned a lot about how hair actually works.

hair follicles are constantly remodelling themselves,

changing structure depending on whether they're growing hair,

It's sort of like they're constantly in development.

And they do use a lot of the same pathways and signals

that are used in early human development.

There's a biotech company run by a Turkish-American billionaire

that works on one of these pathways, that's currently in human trials.

And there are several Japanese research groups

that say that they can clone your hair follicles,

and manipulate their signalling to grow new hair.

And then presumably transplant it back on your head.

All of these discoveries have launched massive new projects

that make better scientific sense than previous treatments.

But they're often in fields that are relatively new

Stem cells are historically quite over-hyped.

about the science behind hair loss itself.

So while a cure looks more realistic than at any time in the recent past,

expectations are probably still way too high.

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Why is there no cure for hair loss? | BBC Ideas

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