Are hair cycles limited ?
Do we have a fixed number of cycles before the hair stops growing?
Hair cycles between the anagen (growth) and telogen (sleep) phases varies with age and sex. Young women have longer cycles than men. The older a man gets, the shorter the cycle is. The same may be true for women, but some women maintain long hair cycles for their entire lives. There is a group of women in China, where the women can grow hair to 8 feet or possibly longer (that is a hell of a long growth cycle). For genetic balding purposes, it is important to note that the number of hair cycles for hairs in different parts of the head vary in AGA. For example, a man who develops a Class 7 pattern by the age of 26 tells me that the number of hair cycles programmed into most of his hair in the front, top, and crown of the head is limited. Let’s say that his hair cycle averaged 3 years since this man was born. That means that he probably had programmed apoptosis (hair death) for close to 9 hair cycles. Of course, we see balding progress in most men, which means that the number of cycles are shorter for the hairs that have fallen out, and longer for those about to fall out. Drugs like finasteride prolong the hair cycle and often stop apoptosis. Get it?
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