Clipping, brushing, styling, gelling, dying, highlighting - women do a great deal to their hair on any given day, putting it through its paces and making it stressed often beyond their beautician’s beliefs! If women do so much to their hair, why is it, then, that women often are able to keep their hair as they grow older and men have to deal with male hair loss?
The Cause
The reason why most men have to deal with the condition more than women is from what causes the condition: DHT. DHT, or dihydrotestosterone, is a hormone that is actually derived from the male hormone testosterone. It is testosterone that makes a man a male and it is testosterone that keeps them as masculine as they are. Most men will agree that testosterone is not a bad thing (unless you get too much in your system, leaving you to deal with aggression issues), so why is DHT bad? DHT is caused when the testosterone hormone runs into the alpha-5 reductase enzyme. This enzyme transforms testosterone into DHT. DHT has but one mission in life: to cause problems for the hair follicles on the body. It tends to land in the scalp, although even now scientists aren’t sure quite why the hormone lands in the scalp, causing male hair loss, and not on other parts of the body.
The hormone then goes to work, stopping the hair follicles from producing new hair. On any given day a person loses up to 100 hairs. This is usually no problem, as the hairs that fall out are immediately replaced by new hairs. The problem, however, comes when a person begins dealing with DHT. This means that there are no new hairs to replace the older hairs that have fallen out, leaving a person who has the condition to begin having a receding hair line or to have a balding spot in the back of their head.
Why More Men
While some women do have to deal with thinning hair, the plain fact of the matter is that more men have to deal with receding hair lines and with balding spots than women do. This is because of what causes the condition – testosterone. While women do have a bit of testosterone in their system, men have a lot more of it, giving the alpha-5 reductase enzyme a greater chance of transforming the testosterone into DHT, and giving the DHT a greater chance to head up to the scalp to cause a bit of a problem up there. While women do often treat their hair in a much more miserable fashion, men are the ones who often have to pay the price simply for being men and for having testosterone, and causing them to look for male hair loss treatment options.
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