Hair Loss In Women: How To Identify & Treat Stress-Related Shedding – The Zoe Report

If it feels like you’re the only one concerned about losing large quantities of hair over the past year and a half, rest assured that you are not. According to data science firm Spate, the average number of Google searches for hair loss was about 829,000 per month in 2020 and early 2021. Clearly, the problem is much bigger than many people might realize.

Read more: How Microneedling For Hair Loss Leads To A Head Full Of Healthy Hair

When it comes to hair loss, men’s balding has typically gotten much of the research and technology — not to mention the bulk of the sympathy. But thinning hair and hair loss in women is a very real phenomenon. Studies estimate that healthy men and women have roughly 80,000-120,000 hairs on average, but it also seems like there’s an equal number of ways to lose that hair.

For example, anagen effluvium is the overall hair fall that occurs after chemotherapy, while alopecia areata is an autoimmune disorder in which hair is lost in large patches. There’s postpartum shedding, and there’s traction alopecia, which is a thinning of the hairline after years of wearing styles in which the hair is pulled back tightly. Women even experience the same type of hair loss as men — androgenetic or androgenic alopecia is an overall thinning or aging of the hair likely caused by the hormone dihydrotestosterone. But there’s one specific kind of hair loss that’s been at the front of everyone’s consciousness recently, and like most things that went wrong beginning in 2020, the pandemic is to blame: meet telogen effluvium.

According to normal hair growth timelines, most of the hair on a person’s head — nearly 85 or 90 percent — is in an active growth cycle known as the anagen phase, that lasts anywhere between two to four years. The rest of the hair is in the telogen or resting phase, which is between one and three months. After that period, the hair falls out and is replaced by new strands.

This process occurs in a gradual, staggered way, ensuring that we naturally lose between 100-150 hairs per day, instead of shedding all our hair at once. A majorly stressful incident, however, can prematurely shift a large number of hair follicles from the growth phase into the resting phase all at the same time, resulting in a mass of strands falling out in a few months. When hair loss is significantly more than 100-150 each day, it veers into telogen effluvium territory — and that’s when you may start to worry about hair loss.

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“Hormone imbalances, major life stress, thyroid conditions, pregnancy, iron deficiency anemia, and crash dieting among other causes can all …….

Source: https://www.thezoereport.com/beauty/hair-loss-in-women-facts