Hair Loss And NSAIDs – Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug
Is hair loss really that common a side effect of taking NSAIDs? If it is, how long does one need to take them before hair loss occurs?
Hair loss is not a common side effect of taking NSAIDS such as Motrin, Advil, etc. It is so rare, I have not personally met anyone in my 20+ years who came to see me for this complaint.
Blog writers often ask about occurrence of side effects (usually hair loss) with a specific drug but almost always never refer to the product labels, which are publicly available on the internet (or FDA web site) and summarize side effects associated with subjects in clinical trials. Drug approvals typically involve thousands of patients. For example, the popular NSAID ibuprofen (Motrin) does not have hair loss listed under the categories “Precise incidence unknown (but less than 1% and probably causal relationship)” and “Precise incidence unknown (but less than 1% and causal relationship) unknown”. Regardless of whether hair loss has occurred with a NSAID (and is casually related to the drug), and sometimes rare side effects can occur in a larger group of patients after drug approval (“post-marketing”), it clearly is not “common”.