Female Hair Loss and Postmenopausal Hormone Changes

I have been asked many times about the drop in estrogen levels with menopause and its effect on hair loss as a protective hormone. The following comes from Dr. Bernard Nusbaum of the Hair Transplant Institute Miami:

“We generally attribute the increased incidence in female pattern hair loss in postmenopausal women to decreased estrogen levels but, the role of estrogens in pattern hair loss is not well understood. Androgens, because of their conversion to estrogen by the enzyme aromatase, indirectly influence estrogen effects. How estrogen affects hair growth is uncertain. There are studies on mice which show that topical estrogen application inhibits hair growth and treatment with an estrogen blocker caused hairs to grow. Laboratory studies on human follicles have shown that estrogen inhibited growth of cultured human follicles.

In contrast, hair dermal papilla cells have been shown to grow in response to estrogen in the laboratory. Also, estrogens are known to increase the production of the protein, sex hormone binding globulin, which leads to a lowering of the active form of testosterone in the blood. Reports of using topical estrogens in patients with pattern alopecia are mostly anecdotal but one double-blind six-month trial of topical estradiol showed stabilization of hair loss in male and female patients.”