New Treatments Spell Good News for Female Hair Loss Sufferers

The misery caused by female hair loss is of a much greater magnitude than that occasioned by its male counterpart. There's something about female hair that is tied in with a very old social view of how women "should" look – which means that women who suffer a loss of hair often feel that they have lost their femininity.

The most common type of female baldness, Androgenetic alopecia, is the exact same sort of hair loss experienced by most balding males. Androgenetic alopecia happens when the scalp or hair follicles display an inherited reaction to the presence of androgens (male hormones) in the glandular secretions on the head, or the skin of the scalp. That's why female hair loss is less common than its male equivalent: women have androgens as well as men, but obviously men, being male, have more.

When a man loses hair through this inherited "allergy", he tends to do so in a uniform pattern, with hair receding from the forehead to the top of the scalp. Unfortunately, women suffering from the same condition lose hair all over the head – i.e., they go bald, rather than displaying a receding hair line.

Traditionally, treatments that deal with loss of hair in women have been lengthy, often extremely painful, and at best only slightly successful. Normal hair replacement treatments have until recently centred on the practice of removing whole strips of skin and hair from a non-balding area, which are then grafted onto the target site. Female hair loss sufferers undergoing this kind of treatment often experience weeks of post-operation swelling, evidence a high risk of infection, and in many cases find that the transplanted hair falls out once the swelling has gone down. Even successful transplants like this don't really work – the transplanted hair, if it seeds, tends to grow in a direction similar to the one it grew in before it was moved. That can make a woman who has had old style hair transplants look as though she is wearing a pretty poor wig.

There are new hair replacement technologies, though, that are starting to show significant breakthroughs in the fight against female hair loss. FT, or Follicular Transfer, is a process that involves implanting individual hairs, chosen for their natural growth direction. In other words, hand-picked donor hairs that will mimic the normal growth of the hair that has been lost.

FT is a far less savage method of hair transplant – no skin grafts, negligible post-operation swelling and a greatly reduced risk of infection. That makes it about as serious an operation as having a tooth pulled: whereas skin grafting methods of hair transplant are so shocking to the body that they are classed as invasive surgery.

The suffering caused by female hair loss, then, is rapidly becoming unnecessary. Where previously women were forced either to undergo painful and often unsuccessful operations, or wear a wig, they are now able to book an easy appointment for a minor operation with a good chance of success. The battle to regain femininity is being won at last.