Will Chemo Cause My Removed Hair to Regrow?

I’ve had Laser treatments to remove the hair on my back and reduce the hair on my chest. I now have very little hair on my back and less on my chest.

Recently I’ve had a CATSCAN. My lymph nodes are irregular and I’m having a biopsy. I’ve been told I may have to do chemo.

I’m aware I can lose much of my hair during these treatments. I realize this is usually temporary. Will this have an effect in reversing any changes made by the Laser on my back and chest?

Thanks.

If the laser succeeded and the hair on the back and chest has been gone for more than a year or two, then the chemotherapy should not impact any regrowth of the body hair that has been removed. The reason I am saying this, is that laser hair removal (when it succeeds) kills the ‘root’ of the hair so that it will not regrow. As you probably know, the laser is about 50% effective at killing each hair, so after one treatment 50% of the hair will return within a few months of the treatment. With each successive treatment 50% of the treated hair dies, so after the second treatment 25% returns, and after the third is 12.5%, then 6%, then 3%, and so on. This assumes that modern hair lasers are used.

Your head hair (if you lose it with chemotherapy) has not been killed off, but rather a chemically induced telogen process will have been precipitated. Chemotherapeutic agents go after the faster growing cells of the body (cancers, hair, certain blood cells, sometimes intestinal cells) and that is the common thread that produces the side effects you may experience with such agents (anemia and white blood cell depletion, bleeding from depleted platelets, diarrhea and nausea from intestinal cell impact). The telogen process from chemotherapy is in the hair follicle and it usually reverses in a few months after the chemo stops. The drugs used vary and not all people lose their hair with some of the chemotherapy agents. Some of the newer chemotherapy agents are more targeted at the cancer and some of these other fast growing cells may not be impacted.