How Long Can One Safely Take a Break from Minoxidil?

[Dr Tom]

TheLastHairbender:
I mean 1 drop of 0.03% bimatoprost solution. My experience is with the ophthalmic solution. It would be easier to mix with a solution and be more practical if you are used to this. I cannot recommend this directly to my patients as you can imagine. Trial and error has led me to "one drop for an area the size of your palm". I suppose you would have to figure out how much minoxidil solution you would use on this size of area and add 1 drop of lumigan for each.

I have found that one 3ml bottle lasts on average 6 weeks of daily use, then you can drop down to every second day/three days a week after 16-20 weeks. If you have a look on my site there are pictures for the application areas (as well as links to papers on the use of bimatoprost etc) http://www.myhairgrowth.org/order.html

You have had some great results with your treatment. I hope it continues to improve.


Stefan:
The hair cycle has three stages: anagen(growth), catagen(transition), telogen(resting AND shedding).

Shedding is part of the telogen phase, but if you make it a separate phase then it would be in the middle of telogen (anagen, catagen, first part of telogen, shedding, second part of telogen)

There are many unknowns with the cycle.

Miniaturisation is a term that refers to the process of a hair follicle decreasing in size. It is thought to be an early sign of male pattern baldness. Some people think that hairs that have underwent miniaturisation cannot be reversed. There is no strong evidence to say that they can be helped or not.

 

[Stefan_88]

Thanks for great input Dr.Tom. it really has been very helpful for me.

As far as i know, Telegon phase ends in 2-3 months. İtalian sources says that its around 2 months. When the shedded hairs come back?

Lets say that Telogen-shedding- 1-1.5 months then its said that it takes 3 months for new hairs to be visible in scalp.

1.5 months for telogen. then anagen phase. new hairs grow and it takes 3 months to be visible on the scalp. so 4.5 months is enough time?

Otherwise, 3 months consists of 1.5 months Telogen and anagen growth at the same time?

My logic says that its too much time. considering Minoxidil users always had shedding phase in the first 3 months and most of shedding hairs re-grows by 6th month. This made me think.

Thanks anyways.

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By the way, Dr. Tom. im on Retin-a cream. i use it 30 mins before Minoxidil application. İs it right usage or i should wait more? Thanks in advance.

 

[Dr Tom]

The phase length is highly variable between people and some say it varies in different areas of the scalp. I think those figures are a good average to consider. Just remember that only a certain proportion of your hairs will be in each phase and they do not change in sync with each other.

I say 20 - 30 minutes. I recommend a pea size amount for the whole scalp and you can mix it with a small amount of moisturiser to help spread it around.

 

[TheLastHairbender]

I mean 1 drop of 0.03% bimatoprost solution.

Whoa! So ~ .05mL of .03% solution once daily is enough to be effective?! That delivers only .015 milligrams of bimatoprost, so only about half a milligram would be used for a month of daily application. At bulk rates of $800/g, that means a month's worth of bulk bimatoprost would cost only 40 cents. The most recent group buy I saw required a 250mg minimum purchase - $200 for a treatment that would last you over 40 years hahaha.

Just to make sure I'm not calculating this incorrectly:
1 drop = ~.05mL x .0003 (since latisse's .03% is expressed w/v) = .000015g, x 1000 = .015mg.

For a month's worth of once-daily minoxidil, 30mL, you'd just dissolve about .5mg in the 30mL liquid (or 1g in a 60mL bottle that would last two months). This delivers the desired .0167mg per 1mL application. Your application advice is corroborated by other available evidence that suggests a minoxidil vehicle is effective for delivering bimatoprost topically to the scalp. And including such a trivial mass of solute should induce no concerns of saturation. One could then just use a second 60mL bottle of unmixed liquid minoxidil for the second daily minoxidil application, or use the bimatoprost-supplemented liquid twice daily as well - I haven't looked into the optimal frequency of applications yet. Even twice daily application, requiring 1g per monthly 60mL of minoxidil would cost under a dollar a month.

Strange though that I've seen recommended (non-authoritatively) that the treatment be mixed at a ratio of .5mg bimatoprost per 1mL liquid application, a dosage over 30 times greater than what you've suggested. I suppose that's the problem with preempting the official channels for dissemination of treatment information. As you're probably aware we've received no guidance from the bimatoprost clinical trials for FDA approval for alopecia - the Phase I and II results have not been released and their manifests describe only a 1 mL application once daily according to three distinct preparations, although no information is provided regarding the bimatoprost concentration or vehicle constituents. I suppose for safety's sake, if I were undertaking this experiment prior to the release of this information, I would prefer your more conservative approach to dosage.

 

[Stefan_88]

Update;

My temples looks worse than ever for now. its very interesting, yet Temples was the best area i had after my shedding period ends.

Btw, i have big problem with body hair which increased so much after Minoxidil and Finasteride. i really dont know what to do. i also see new hairs on my arms growing, it seems it will be much worse in the coming months.

 

[TheLastHairbender]

Oh man I'm sorry to hear that. Staying on schedule is still probably the best course of action, it's possible the reintroduction of minoxidil has induced some additional shedding there, which would preempt expected regrowth. If you're using retin-a on the temples as well maybe it should be discontinued for the time being, at least until the minoxidil's impact seems to have stabilized, so that you can identify the two treatments' separate effects. Changing the usage of two treatments simultaneously like you have presents the drawback that the effects of either one by itself is more difficult to isolate from the other (the benefit, though, being the opportunity to save more hair compared to leaving one potentially helpful treatment on hold just for purposes of identification, so it's not necessarily that you did something wrong, this uncertainty is just the cost you may or may not have had to bear). If you're certain that things are continuing to get worse at the temples, I would curtail the use of retin-a before I curtailed the use of minoxidil.

I would also suggest careful consideration of whether or not things are verifiably deteriorating, or whether it could just be short-term fluctuation in appearance. I do notice day-to-day changes in appearance that cannot be attributed to additional hair growth or loss over such short periods. At times my hair maintains a more oily texture which pulls it down toward the scalp and clumps together, while other times it tends to be more dry and uniform which presents a fuller overall appearance; the difference in appearance of coverage between the two states is very noticeable, and may only be separated by a few days time. So it's possible that some physical property of the hair itself is responsible for the visible changes you see, and not a characteristic of regrowth or fallout. It is worth making a critical examination.

Regarding body hair, some people note trends to this effect. Minoxidil can induce hair growth and thickening wherever it repeatedly comes in contact with skin. Someone, yassin I think, has thick, jet black knuckle hairs that look like tree trunks growing out of his fingers. He comically journals the knuckle hair growth with a gratuitous photo in some of his updates. So as far as minoxidil is concerned try to limit collateral exposure, and make sure to wash your hands very thoroughly with soap and water, maybe twice if you're concerned, as the PG is oily and residue can remain on the hands, spreading to other parts of the body you might then touch, with an impact on unwanted hair growth after prolonged repeated exposure. Another thought is to have a package of disposable paper towels available at your sink for drying your hands after minoxidil applications, rather than reusing a fabric hand towel. I suppose residues could be transferred to-and-from a hand towel after repeated use as well; this is just my speculation and may be wholly unnecessary.

Finasteride on the other hand should not increase body hair, and may in fact decrease it, because DHT is partly responsible for inducing hair growth in areas other than the androgen-sensitive regions of your scalp. That's the clinical ideal anyway, I'm sure there are more anecdotes about this from the community if you search for the topic. This has never been an issue for me personally - never grew any chest hair, arms and legs have only a thin blonde layer - so I haven't really explored other peoples' experiences in this area. Maybe you're just getting old :dunno: ? Kidding - I hope the temples start to improve, try to relax about it, being stressed only works against you.

 

[Stefan_88]

Temples was the worst part of my hairs before 5 days Minoxidil break too. so i dont think its the problem. Yet 2 months ago,(the time my shedding period ended) My temples was the best part of my hairs. i shaved my hairs off at that time, if a shedding period happened to my temples at that time, i couldnt notice it because of this. i dont know.

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Regarding body hair, i dont know yet maybe it occured because of massage during Minoxidil applications. i massage with my left hand for some mins then i wash my hands 2-3 times because of Minoxidil. Like i said, its because of massage, otherwise, i dont find any other reason other than that.

Btw, Thanks for very informative post. Now, i will try not to massage, also considering it causes some sheddings during my applications.

 

[TheLastHairbender]

Yeah I don't know, the temples are a treatment-resistant region for a lot of people. It can be a very difficult location to generate regrowth (minoxidil was not granted the authority to claim regrowth potential at the temples, for example, although it definitely works there for me). But the fact that you had previously realized gains there is surprising. For me the trouble region is the vertex, I've had great gains all over but can't close up a 3-4cm circle at the very top. I'm going to try a few targeted growth promoters there to see if new growth can be generated, starting with 4% miconazole nitrate, then likely bimatoprost. You may try a similar targeted strategy for your temples if you find they are definitely resistant to minoxidil. I would continue with your current plan for a bit longer though to be sure, although I know that's a difficult thing to do when things seem to be getting worse rather than better. Still, short-termism is a killer of many treatment plans.

Since you did have good results at the temples, which you say have shed significantly in recent months and not grown back, perhaps you'd consider a supplemental topical anti-androgen instead of another growth promoter. Unfortunately the state-of-the-art in topical anti-androgens is underdeveloped in my opinion. I could not in good conscience recommend RU, CB, or ASC-J9 at this stage of their development, although others surely would. IMO, your only safe bets at present for topical anti-androgens are the relatively weak and incredibly costly Fluridil (approved safe cosmetic in EU and sold from Czech, so may not be as expensive to you as it is in the US) or the more potent and still expensive (although less so) Spironolactone, from which I've personally benefitted and maintain a positive opinion. Those are just options for some time in the future. I really think you should look past it for the moment and continue your regimen as usual. It really hasn't been long enough even since your shedding period ended to make any final determinations. My humble opinion: continue implementing your regimen religiously, focus on something else for now, then let's revisit this at the end of the year.

 

[Stefan_88]

i already added Hydrocortisone %1 cream to my regimen. However i decided to give 1 month or so to them, if they dont work, i'll look for other alternatives.As you know, i give up Biotin because of the side effect. i fear from side effects from anti-androgens. i used HC cream in the past, this is why i think its the best option for me.

However my doctor told me that i should give 3-4 months after shedding period ends. Now 64-65 days passed, i still have long way to go.

However, i tried spironolactone in the past, i gave up because it caused white flakes and residue on my scalp.

As you know, Minoxidil is dose depandent, Why dont you try new things for there? such as making more applications. Some of my friends was not responding to treatment, they were making 3-4 Minoxidil applications, they were saying that it worked for them. There are peoples who reports re-growth after doubling Minoidil applications too. a bit wet scalp and retin-a cream would help as well. i hope you thickening up that vertex area.

 

[TheLastHairbender]

Thanks for the support. I have done a course of retin-a up there, hard to distinguish the individual benefits but wasn't enough to create hair where there was none. I am actually planning to do a course of 15% minoxidil but it's become pretty tough to get in the U.S. I may also increase the frequency of minoxidil applications like you suggest, actually that's a really good idea. Well I'll implement some combination of those four things (miconazole, bimatoprost, 15% minoxidil, 3x/day minoxidil) in some order and as scientifically as possible for the best chance at distinguishing which combination is most effective for committing to long-term use. Thanks for the ideas!

 

[TheLastHairbender]

[reference to deleted spam]
Hi freelancer hired by Bojan Dubovljevic, hope you enjoyed posting the backlink to your website.

Nice try using [a href] tags to make it less obvious. You may also try [font color=] tags around the link text to hide it even more.
Unfortunately html is not parsed in thread update emails, so anyone who's subscribed can see what you're doing.
Good luck next time!

 

[Admin]

Well, lets not help him with more ideas ....

For now we are leaving his post there because we're troubleshooting why he was even able to post a link in the first place. It should have blocked him. Apologies for leaving the spam. I've modified the URL either way.

Admin

 

[TheLastHairbender]

Well, lets not help him with more ideas ....

No danger in that, looking at the volume of web-wide spam of that particular post I'm sure HairLossTalk.com was never personally visited.

It looks like you've already set [rel=nofollow], so he doesn't get points but it doesn't help for prevention. (Hopefully nofollow isn't a global attribute, that would be kinda punitive to the good guys who share a lot of content and may deserve a friendly backlink.)

Set the .htaccess file to block known bad bots and crawlers (current lists are easy to find) and add a back-end package like Akismet, Typepad, etc. Either you're not using one or it's not properly configured, cause judging by the other sites that got hit that was just a scrapebox or SEnuke blast, and those guys should not be getting through. Xrumer 7 is basically unstoppable right now but that was not xrumer or it would've pulled way more than the dozen successful links that post scored across the web. Good luck, we appreciate the fine work you do in this area.

 

[zeroes]

That was all my bad

What exactly was the site doing?

 

[TheLastHairbender]

No biggie, some spammer running SEO tools dropped a backlink as an html href attribute in his first post. Only thing is that if you look at the only few sites that allowed it to get crawled it's a pretty weak group to be a part of (basically unmoderated tumblr lists), suggesting it was a pretty weak linkbuilding utility that got through. Here's the list: http://tiny.cc/zg65mw. I checked right after it was posted and there were only a couple more entries, so it's not like 50,000 blogs set [nofollow] afterwards, he just didn't get through many verification systems, and there's no reason HairLossTalk.com should be one of them. Maybe your anti-spam platform was just momentarily down, cause this site must get hit with hundreds or thousands a day and very few bots ever make it through (usually it's the human shill, which should be taken as a kind of honor these days - that what we're doing merits human attention).

If you're trying to wave off bots simply via robots.txt then you should definitely force a redirect through the .htaccess file, using something like:

[SIZE=1][FONT=verdana]RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} badbot1 [OR]
[/FONT][/SIZE][SIZE=1][FONT=verdana]...
[/FONT][/SIZE][SIZE=1][FONT=verdana]RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} badbotN
[/FONT][/SIZE][SIZE=1][FONT=verdana]RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L][/FONT][/SIZE]

and just make sure Akismet, TypePad, AbyssGuard, or whatever is running and functional. You can pay a couple linkbuilders on fiverr to spoof target your site and get a poor man's spam audit for $20. I don't recall the signup process but KeyCAPTCHA, vBMC, Animal Captcha, and even vBulletin 4's built-in Q&A is pretty good for that purpose but it's always cat-and-mouse. I imagine most of this (disallow in robots.text, redirects in .htaccess, anti-spam plugin, reverse Turing tests during signup) is already being implemented; your site is PR4 in a high value market so I'm sure you're getting blasted from all angles. That one or two slip through the cracks here and there should already be considered success for the volume you must be dealing with. It might be wise to source a cheap audit though to make sure everything is configured optimally; with those methods in place you'll stop scrapebox, amr, sick submitter, brute force seo, pretty much everyone but crafty users of xrumer at the moment. Problem is, that didn't come from xrumer, not v7 at least. Good luck!

Here's info on the offending target site: http://tiny.cc/m465mw.

 

[zeroes]

I Wiki'd Backlink, ok it makes since what they were trying to do.

What part of the links should I be taking a look for outside of obvious spam?

 

[Stefan_88]

Update;

My shedding increased lately, considering i was not shedding much hairs during last weeks. was shedding only a few hairs during applications and sometimes i was finding 1-2 weak hairs on my pillow. The shedding increased a bit compared to last weeks, while, the shedding hairs are a bit thinner than the rest of the hairs and still 1cm or so hairs.

My hairs looks thinner in some part of my head, as i have a thinning spot at my right side of my hairs. it has been 2.5 months after my shedding period ended. i still need to wait a bit considering my dermatologist told me that i need 3-4 months at that time.

 

[Stefan_88]

Update,

My hair looks thin at right side and crown, also considering my shedding increased so much lately. im shedding small hairs again.

i added Garlic Shampoo to my regimen.

- - - Updated - - -

Update,

My hair looks thin at right side and crown, also considering my shedding increased so much lately. im shedding small hairs again.

i added Garlic Shampoo to my regimen.

 

[LawOfThelema]

why would you want to break from something that increases hair weight by 20% ?

 

[Stefan_88]

Just because some days break boosts up the results.

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Regarding the shampoo i used, Many says that it reduced or stopped their shedding. Off course, i didnt believe in them, however you can see more information about it below.

[h=1]GARLIC SHAMPOO[/h]
[h=3]THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GARLIC SHAMPOO[/h]
All garlic ingredients have beneficial effects. Garlic is an inevitable raw material within the sco pe of herbal treatments. The human body’s elementary structure consists of amino acids. However there are 17 sorts of amino acids which cannot be produced by the human body. These must be provided externally ZlGAVUS GARLIC SHAMPOO contains these men tioned amino acids. In addition, garlic-shampoo contains vitamins A, B1- B6 and C, as well as zinc, folic acid, beta carotene, calcium, iron, caffeic acid, potassium phosphor, selenium, niacin (B3), cumaric acid, geraniol and many other beneficial organic ingredients. Sulphuric combinations and odours are isolated. Thus no irritations occur. The organic ingredient of geraniol provides the shampoo’s specific odour. That is why the shampoo does not smell like garlic.

[h=3]EFFECTS:[/h]

• When it is used regularly, it prevents hair loss at 96% rate and takes its effects within 20 day.
• Due to its antiseptic, antibiotic, antiviral, antioxidant effects, it cleans germs, viruses and dead cells which has been accumulated in the hair skin, eliminates the seborrheic dermatitis (scurfy) which may occur.
• With its rich recipe with regard. Beta-carotene, zinc and calcium, it brings in to hair the health, vitality, resistance.
• It makes the hair thicken and strengthen, in continuous use that helps to regeneration and activation of the hair molecules which is not died, to arrange the blood circulation.
• It has preventive feature for seasonal and genetic origin hair loss.
• PH value is comply with hair skin, derm and does not cause allergy and irritation.
• By regulating the melanin cells, it protects the hair’s color and prevent early go grey.
  It is also effective for disease such as pelade.
• The persons who eliminated the hair loss by transplant hair method can use easily.
• There is no drawback to use in pregnancy and lactation period.
• It Does not contain colorant.
• Since adverse effect is not exist, it is suitable for continuous use.

[h=3]APPLICATION:[/h] Apply some shampoo (every day) in wet scalp by massaging and rinse. Apply again in same way and wait 2-3 minutes. Thus substances in garlic extract will penetrate to scalp. Finally, rinse your hair with plenty of water. Do not use other products in order to see effect of Zigavus shampoo with garlic.