Short Cycling Morphology Of Hairs

Thanks for your great blog. It’s really helped me be informed about hair loss. If I am shedding many short, thin hairs that are tapered at the end, not the root, is this an early sign of male pattern balding? I assume that my hairs growth cycles are shortening and falling out before they can get long. Any advice would help. Thanks.

Many readers ask about the morphology of their hairs falling out and how it relates to Male Pattern Balding. We can lose about 100 hairs a day and the morphology of each hairs are variable. The miniaturized hairs are skinny and thinner as the hairs may be going into the telogen phase. Some hairs that fall may be bulky and thick and may have been just pulled out inadvertently. Some hairs may have white waxy substance known as sebum on its ends. Many readers or websites may try to correlate the hair morphology with some disease process but for the most part all of these are normal part of the hair cycle. When it comes to Male Pattern Balding, it is about the PATTERN you see in the balding pattern. If you want to take it one step further, you can put a microscope to your scalp to see if there is a variation in the diameter of hair at different locations to establish a “pattern” of miniaturiation. The very fine hairs should not constitute more than 20% of the hairs that you are looking at. This is what I often refer to as a Miniaturization Study.