For a female, hair loss can feel incredibly shameful. Our hair speaks volumes about our personality and is a big factor in the way we evaluate our looks. A healthy head of hair indicates vitality, youthfulness, and health. When women begin to lose their hair, it can be a huge blow to their self esteem, but there are ways to restore it. Before seeking treatment, it's important to understand it's causes.
Hair Style
For some women, hair loss may be attributed to hairstyle! Wearing your hair in styles that pull tightly such as pigtails, braids, and cornrows can pull hair out at a faster rate than normal. At any given time, about 90 percent of your hair is in a growth state and 10 percent is in a relaxed state where it will eventually fall out naturally. If your hairstyle causes the growing hair to become pulled out, this can severely reduce the amount of hair on your scalp.
A hair follicle will grow for approximately 2 to 6 years. If you suspect that hair style may be at the root of your female hair-loss condition, change your hairstyle right away, but expect that it will take several years to grow back to it's natural fullness.
Hormones
Hormones are perhaps the most common cause of female hair loss. Women tend to experience loss after having a baby, after surgery, during menopause, or at other times in their lives when hormones change. The onset of female hair loss may be an indicator of an over or under-active thyroid gland. If you are experiencing hair-loss at a time in your life where your hormones should otherwise be stable, you may want to have your doctor run some tests to check your thyroid.
Medications
Some types of medications such as blood thinners, vitamin A, anti-depressants, birth control pills, and medications used to treat cancer or gout can cause female hair loss. One way to determine if medication is the cause of your condition is to see if the condition improves when you stop taking the medication. However, many of these medications cannot just be stopped, and because hair growth is such a slow process, it may be quite some time before you can tell if the condition has improved. Ask your doctor if any of the medications you are taking cause female hair loss and look for alternatives.
Diseases and Infections
Female hair loss may be an indicator of an underlying disease such as lupus, diabetes, or a fungal infection of the scalp. If your hair loss symptoms don't seem to have other causes, it's a good idea to check with your doctor about possible diseases or infections that could be the core of the problem.
Unfortunately, in many cases losing hair is not something that can be reversed by changing hairstyle or stopping a medication. For many women, hair loss is a fact of life. However, this doesn't mean that women have to live with thin hair and bald patches. Today's hair restoration technology has improved dramatically in recent years and can quickly and painlessly give women back a full head of hair and their sense of self-esteem.
