The alopecia.com.au website is now functional so please feel free to add comments or share your experience with other people affected by hair loss. Also, if you have any articles about hair or hair loss you want to share with others, please send them to our website.

Please bear in mind that I am trying to keep this website as medically and scientifically reliable as possible, so please do not be offended if your entry is not uploaded onto the website. However, any personal experience with hair loss that may benefit others and good for sharing will be uploaded. This is essential so that people accessing this website can be rest-assured that the content is carefully filtered and reliable.

I have also added some information about male and female pattern hair loss, as well as alopecia areata on the website. Please be patient while I upload more information on other hair conditions. Please let me know your thoughts about how I can improve this website.

Coming soon....some recommended books you can purchase and read about hair loss.

Again, please be patient. This doctor knows very little about managing a website...and I am doing this pro bono to provide a support network for those who have asked, so please bear with me!

The webmaster - LY

Welcome to this exciting newly updated alopecia website - fully managed by a medical practitioner with special interest in hair loss research.

Support for people affected by hair loss conditions is sparse, and the information available to answer your questions about hair loss could be confusing and misleading. This website aims to provide you with reliable medical-based information about different aspects of hair loss and to provide a hub for support for those affected by hair loss.

Please bear with the website overhaul in the next few months and allow some time for this website to be fully functional - this doctor needs time to learn how to run a website!

DISCLAIMER: THIS WEBSITE DOES NOT SERVE AS A REPLACEMENT FOR EXPERT MEDICAL ADVICE. PLEASE SEE YOUR DOCTOR FOR A FORMAL ASSESSMENT IF YOU ARE SEEKING TREATMENT.

A recent publication in the May 2007 issue of Nature reported a breakthrough in hair follicle research that could create a major paradigm shift for the treatment of baldness.

The researchers have found that hair follicles in adult mice regenerate by re-awakening genes once active only in developing embryos. These findings provide unequivocal evidence for the first time that, like other animals such as newts and salamanders, mammals have the power to regenerate.

"We showed that wound healing triggered an embryonic state in the skin which made it receptive to receiving instructions from wnt proteins,” says senior author George Cotsarelis, MD, Associate Professor of Dermatology. “The wnts are a network of proteins implicated in hair-follicle development.”

“We’ve found that we can influence wound healing with wnts or other proteins that allow the skin to heal in a way that has less scarring and includes all the normal structures of the skin, such as hair follicles and oil glands, rather than just a scar,” explains Cotsarelis.

By introducing more wnt proteins to the wound, the researchers found that they could take advantage of the embryonic genes to promote hair-follicle growth, thus making skin regenerate instead of just repair. Conversely by blocking wnt proteins, they also found that they could stop the production of hair follicles in healed skin.

Increased wnt signaling doubled the number of new hair follicles. This suggests that the embryonic window created by the wound-healing process can be used to manipulate hair-follicle regeneration, leading to novel ways to treat hair loss and hair overgrowth.

These findings go beyond just a possible treatment for male-pattern baldness. If researchers can effectively control hair growth, then they could potentially find cures for people with hair and scalp disorders, such as scarring alopecia where the skin scars, and hair overgrowth.

Source: University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine