HAIR LOSS

Thin hair relates to how many hairs are on your scalp. The fewer hairs you have the thinner your hair is. Fine hair, however, relates to the thickness of the strands of hair. Someone with fine hair can have hair strands that are half the thickness of someone with coarse hair(which is the thickest type of hair).Thinning hair refers to the process of the reduction of the number of hairs on the scalp.

Whilst everybody’s hair gets thinner as they get older some people experience excessive hair loss. There are various possible reasons for this hair loss including acute stress, hormonal problems, certain infections and the effect of some medicines eg. those used in chemotherapy to treat cancer. Additionally hair loss may indicate an underlying disease.Hair loss caused by any of the above is usually temporary or reversible.

However, heredity is by far the most common cause of this excessive hair loss.

In men it is called male-pattern baldness (androgenetic alopecia) and it usually results in a receding hairline and baldness on top of the head.

In women female-pattern baldness, which results in the hair becoming thinner over the whole scalp, is related to hormone levels in the body and there is a large genetic predisposition which can be inherited from either side of the family. This type of hair loss affects some women before the menopause but it is particularly common after the menopause.