Hi - tried this on another forum but got no results. Hoping you guys can help.
Background: I'm 24 (nearing 25), and have a very mild history of Androgenetic Alopecia in my family, if any: my mother's father still has a lush head of hair at 85, my father's father starting receding in his 50s, my father is just beginning to recede now at 58, and my father's brother is still OK at 56. We do have pretty lousy scalp health on my dad's side (Scottish - dermatitis or psoriasis, I forget which; mine's bad enough that T-Gel doesn't even really do the trick, but daily Nizoral 1% has started to), but that's about it.
In January I started noticing hair loss; more accurately, my girlfriend at the time found a patch of hair in the drain and started teasing me about balding. I had just double-dyed my hair for the first time (black, then black again with red), so we figured that the dye had nuked it and that it was all a big joke. For a while I just kept checking the shed hairs to see if they were black, and as they typically were, I attributed the loss to the dye job, but after two months of shedding 200+ hairs a day I began to worry. One night I was walking around Pasadena and felt a mild wind ruffling my scalp in places I never knew I had, so I decided to make a doctor's appointment. I did my homework, asked all the right questions, and was totally neglected by a very apathetic and very bald doctor who'd scheduled me fifteen minutes before his lunch break. "Cyclical shedding" was his verdict: "you shed 200-300 hairs a day normally anyway". Sure. That set me back another month trying to find another derm to look at me, and I finally have an appointment on Friday.
Anyway, that leads me to my question. It's now April and I'm still shedding a good 200 hairs a day. The Nizoral doesn't seem to have much of an effect on the shed, though it's done wonders for my scalp (though it's still white, especially on the top of my head, and my hair basically looks like it's been sprinkled with a salt shaker here and there). I don't think I suffered any stressful events to set off telogen effluvium (had a nasty ankle sprain or break last May that I couldn't treat because I wasn't insured which did a number on my system, but that was at least five months before any shedding), so I'm reluctantly figuring I must have male pattern baldness. While my loss appears to be somewhat diffuse (I can pull hairs out of my sideburns, for example, without feeling any pain), it's concentrated largely on the top of my head, and the loss itself manifests largely in an increased part rather than any spots or thinning at the temples. My hairline doesn't really seem to have receded (I have a scar there from when I was three that hasn't become any more visible). My one question for you guys is just how I could've picked up male pattern baldness. Does it have to have a specific genetic history? I can't find one in my family: is it possible to have a much more exacerbated condition than my father/paternal grandpa?
Thanks for any help, means the world to me. Very concerned about this and want to be aggressive in treatment; lost an aunt to cancer this year who was diagnosed too late, so learned a lot about attacking problems with haste.
Background: I'm 24 (nearing 25), and have a very mild history of Androgenetic Alopecia in my family, if any: my mother's father still has a lush head of hair at 85, my father's father starting receding in his 50s, my father is just beginning to recede now at 58, and my father's brother is still OK at 56. We do have pretty lousy scalp health on my dad's side (Scottish - dermatitis or psoriasis, I forget which; mine's bad enough that T-Gel doesn't even really do the trick, but daily Nizoral 1% has started to), but that's about it.
In January I started noticing hair loss; more accurately, my girlfriend at the time found a patch of hair in the drain and started teasing me about balding. I had just double-dyed my hair for the first time (black, then black again with red), so we figured that the dye had nuked it and that it was all a big joke. For a while I just kept checking the shed hairs to see if they were black, and as they typically were, I attributed the loss to the dye job, but after two months of shedding 200+ hairs a day I began to worry. One night I was walking around Pasadena and felt a mild wind ruffling my scalp in places I never knew I had, so I decided to make a doctor's appointment. I did my homework, asked all the right questions, and was totally neglected by a very apathetic and very bald doctor who'd scheduled me fifteen minutes before his lunch break. "Cyclical shedding" was his verdict: "you shed 200-300 hairs a day normally anyway". Sure. That set me back another month trying to find another derm to look at me, and I finally have an appointment on Friday.
Anyway, that leads me to my question. It's now April and I'm still shedding a good 200 hairs a day. The Nizoral doesn't seem to have much of an effect on the shed, though it's done wonders for my scalp (though it's still white, especially on the top of my head, and my hair basically looks like it's been sprinkled with a salt shaker here and there). I don't think I suffered any stressful events to set off telogen effluvium (had a nasty ankle sprain or break last May that I couldn't treat because I wasn't insured which did a number on my system, but that was at least five months before any shedding), so I'm reluctantly figuring I must have male pattern baldness. While my loss appears to be somewhat diffuse (I can pull hairs out of my sideburns, for example, without feeling any pain), it's concentrated largely on the top of my head, and the loss itself manifests largely in an increased part rather than any spots or thinning at the temples. My hairline doesn't really seem to have receded (I have a scar there from when I was three that hasn't become any more visible). My one question for you guys is just how I could've picked up male pattern baldness. Does it have to have a specific genetic history? I can't find one in my family: is it possible to have a much more exacerbated condition than my father/paternal grandpa?
Thanks for any help, means the world to me. Very concerned about this and want to be aggressive in treatment; lost an aunt to cancer this year who was diagnosed too late, so learned a lot about attacking problems with haste.
Does going grey mean anything?
