Hair Restoration Blog

There is a newly published article where the authors wrote about reconstituting skin from stem cells. This process, explained in the article, requires hair stem cells which are capable of making new skin, including hair, and other skin appendages.

The authors discuss that they have developed a simplified procedure that could modulate, or adjust, the hair formation ability of candidate stem cells. Based on their observations, the formed hair follicles could cycle and regenerate, and the reconstituted skin can heal after injury. These samples were evaluated one year after skin transplant, and they were in good condition.

Hair stem cell is a very hot topic in regenerative medicine and scientists hope they can make other tissues and organs from pluripotential cells that can develop into different cell lineages. We at US Hair Restoration have also recently published an article (Towards expansion of human hair follicle stem cells in vitro) that sheds light on another angle of hair stem cell research and can pave the way for future hair multiplication (also known as hair cloning). Hair multiplication has  great potential of being a medical treatment for hair loss in the future.

More information on this research can be found in the newly published article  in the Tissue Engineering: Part C, Methods on hair multiplication through multiplication of hair stem cells. The articles is titled “A simplified procedure to reconstitute hair-producing skin” by Lee, et al. from Division of Plastic Surgery, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California.

Q:

hey doctor:

is it true i can lose hair by wearing a baseball cap a lot of the time? if that’s the case, then i guess baseball players are good candidates for hair transplants! =P. but really, is there any truth to that? I read that it doesn’t have an effect on a person’s hair, but i wanted to verify with an actually hair loss doctor.

A:

We can lose hair due to environmental trauma to the hair shaft and, consequently, to the hair follicles. The name of this condition is traction alopecia; it can be seen when people braid their hair very tightly. One type of traction alopecia is called turban alopecia, for people who wear turbans on their head for long periods of time and when they wear it tightly. Baseball caps are regularly used by people, and I have not seen it in those people who wear them. However, you can guess that a tight cap of any kind may mimic the turban effect and may cause traction alopecia in which hair follicles are being pulled over time, which destroy them eventually.