My Hair Keeps Going Through Seasonal Sheds That Worry Me

Dear doctor,

I am a 22 years old male with very little family history of male pattern baldness. Yet a few months ago (I think last may or april) I started to experience some drastic hair loss. I was literally shedding all over my clothes, the tub, the kitchen floor… As I grew really desperate I went to visit a dermatologist who told me I was going through telogen effluvium. I actually changed my diet at the beginning of the year by becoming a vegetarian, so I figured it made sense that my hair would undergo a moment of weakness. I took various vitamins for two months or so and things seemed to get better until october.

I have always been very sensitive to the changing of season, hair-wise, so it didn’t worry me at first, but now I find it weird that this is still going on to the present day. But what confuses me the most is the nature of my sheds. I had already noticed that I would lose hair that were a lot shorter than the others (my hair is mid-long), although they seemed to have the same thickness. This could all be a result of effluvium. However, I started to find these days hairs that were thinner than what they should be… Some of them have a normal length but are just pretty thin and fuzzy. Others are also really small… I have no visible recession of my hairline (yet ?). I can tell my hair still fall from all over my head, even in the areas never affected by AGA. But I am scared to death, are those tiny sheds a definite sign of MPB ?

I hope you will answer my message. Sorry if I made a few mistakes. Regards.

You should get baseline measurements on your hair bulk to determine the significance of the shedding, and quantify just how much hair you are losing over time.

As for a seasonal shedding, I’ve had a few reports emailed to me from readers over the years about this, but there is no medical explanation that I know of for it. Humans have asynchronous hair growth, which means that we do not shed in seasons, but do so relatively uniformly over the year.