Pattern baldness in women usually starts in their early teens and gets worse as they get older. This is shown by the way the hair on the front of the head thins over time. Most of the time, women with pattern baldness don't lose more hair. However, unlike telogen effluvium, pattern baldness can start with hair loss. As the disease gets worse, the scalp shows more and more.
Most of the time, the part of the head in the middle gets wider because the hair density in the frontal scalp and crown thins out. Some women may lose hair in a few small spots on the front of their scalp, while others may lose hair all over their scalp, including the parietal and occipital areas. When women lose their hair, they usually keep a small strip of hair along the front hairline.
Diagnosis In lab
Most women with pattern baldness have normal periods, fertility, and endocrine function, including the right amount of androgens in their blood. So, they would only need a lot of hormone testing when the symptoms and signs of too much androgen are really clear. When hirsutism, severe, unresponsive cystic acne, virilization, or galactorrhoea are present, it is important to measure serum total or free testosterone, dehydroepiandrosterone sulphate, and prolactin in the lab. Getting a complete blood count, measuring serum thyrotropin, serum iron, and ferritin, and measuring serum thyrotropin may rule out common causes of hair loss.
Other Symptoms
The first condition can be confused with androgenetic alopecia in women. Even though the signs of chronic telogen effluvium are different, this is still the case. Anyway, when the ratio of terminal hairs shrinks, horizontal sections of a scalp biopsy can help tell the difference between the two conditions. Morphology Pattern baldness is a type of hair loss in which the hairs get smaller over time. The papillae and matrices, as well as the hair shafts, are all parts of these hairs. But women don't lose as much hair as some men do. Patterned hair loss in women causes a patchwork of hairs of different sizes on the top of the scalp. Since there are more spaces between the hairs on the frontal scalp, the middle part looks bigger than it does on the occipital scalp.
In some cases, the hair's volume may still look normal, but it won't grow as long as it used to, which usually makes the ends thin. Women with female pattern hair loss can see their hair getting thinner, while men with this type of hair loss will go bald in the affected areas. Androgenetic alopecia can be treated.
Hair loss happens when the hair cycle doesn't work right. Because of this, it could, in theory, go the other way. But the current treatments don't always work as well as they could, and sometimes only small changes in hair density can be seen. Advanced pattern baldness may already be hard to treat because inflammation around the bulge of the follicle may have already caused damage to the follicular stem cell that can't be fixed. Some plans for treating this case in a systematic way are:
Minoxidil is the main treatment for pattern baldness right now. No one knows exactly how Minoxidil works, but the treatment seems to affect the hair follicle in three ways: it lengthens the time hair follicles spend in the anagen phase, it wakes up hair follicles that are in the catagen phase, and it makes the hair follicles bigger. In the end, vellus hairs get bigger and change into terminal hairs, and less hair fall out.
Exogenous oestrogen can be used to treat pattern baldness, but because Minoxidil works so well, this method isn't used as much as it used to be.
Finasteride has helped men with pattern baldness, but it was dangerous for women to use. This regimen is not good for women who are still of childbearing age because it contains 5a-reductase inhibitors, which can cause male foetuses to be born with abnormal external genitalia.
Pattern baldness can make your hair look bad, but you can make it look better by styling, teasing, colouring, using permanents, and using hair spray. But if the hair loss is really bad, the person may choose to wear wigs.
- For women who have tried treatments for hair loss that didn't work or didn't work well enough, surgery may be another option and the best method for them.
- Hair transplantation is also an option since it is already used to treat male pattern baldness. Now, it is also used to treat hair loss in women, though very few women get this kind of treatment because it is expensive and could be traumatic.
Conclusion
Pattern hair loss in women is caused by a number of things, some of which are inherited. This strange type of hair loss could be caused by both androgen-dependent and androgen-independent processes. In women, it usually has a pattern where the frontal and parietal scalps are the thinnest and the occipital scalp has the most hair. When women lose their hair in strange ways, it can hurt their self-esteem, mental health, and body image. Because of this, it is very important for a doctor to tell a patient who is losing hair that it could have bad effects on the quality of their life.
