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Understanding the Hair Growth Cycle
Hair Loss Treatment
Articles | Understanding the Hair Growth Cycle |
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If you’re balding or worried about becoming bald, one of the very best prevention and treatment steps you can take is to learn. Knowledge is the key to dealing with your baldness! When you understand your hair and your balding, you can make better choices about how to proceed and you can quickly spot if your baldness is natural or if you may need to see a doctor. Learn all you can about your hair, including about a healthy growth cycle, so that you understand what is happening to your own body. The hair growth cycle is different in humans than it is in any other animal in the world. If you have pets or even if you don’t, you probably know that during certain seasons, their hair gets very thick and long, while during other seasons they shed uncontrollably. Animals do this biologically, even if they are indoors all of the time with no exposure to the actual change of seasons. Humans, on the other hand, do not shed in predictable patterns. Our hair is still part of a cycle, like the hair of animals, but each hair on our head is at a different stage of this cycle. Therefore, our hair is overall constantly shedding and growing at once. It is normal to use anywhere from 25 to 100 hairs every day and, in general, our hair will grow about 6 inches every year, although this may happen in spurts at times. There are three stages to hair growth: catagen, telogen, and anagen. The catagen stage lasts for up to three weeks and leads the hair through a period of transition. The hair stops growing and the outer root shrinks up to attack to the root in the follicle. This forms what is known as a club hair. Next is the telogen stage. Your hair is prone to fall out during this stage, because the hair is at rest. Lastly, the hair transitions into the anagen stage. This is the active stage of the hair, when it grows rapidly. The anagen stage can last anywhere from two to six years, so if your hair seems to grow very slowly, you probably have a shorter anagen period. Baldness usually comes with a hair falls out in the telogen stage and then cannot grow back. This can happen for many reasons. For example, if your follicle is clogged, the hair cannot push through and the root dies. If your hair falls out, in most cases it will grow back, but if it doesn’t grow back and the root dies, it never will. |
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