Alopecia Explained: What Is Alopecia? (Areata, Scarring, Androgenic, and other Hair Loss Types)

What is alopecia and what can you do about it? Let’s talk about it. Alopecia is actually just a generic medical term for hair loss. So when someone says they have alopecia, they’re basically just saying that they have hair loss. So how do you understand what alopecia that you’re dealing with? And what genre of treatment is going to actually positively influence the alopecia that you have? So the most common alopecia’s are broken down into three categories. So one, androgenetic alopecia. So androgen, genetically related alopecia. Again, alopecia is the medical term for hair loss. So technically all hair loss is an alopecia. Androgenetic alopecia is DHT related, it is going to be something like male and female pattern hair loss, and is directly related to how much dihydrotestosterone is influencing your hair follicles. The next form of alopecia is something that I call nutritional alopecia and nutritional alopecia is technically not a medical term, but nutritional hair loss is something that affects probably 80% of the individuals that I see. That’s related to a zinc, ferritin, vitamin D3 or folate deficiency. When you’re dealing with those types of nutritional deficiencies that will lead to a nutritional alopecia, which is a diffused thinning throughout the entire scalp. Now, the third set of alopecia is an inflammatory alopecia. Now these might be your traditional alopecias that people when they say I have alopecia that they might’ve been diagnosed by a dermatologist or they might have really come to understand that that’s something that they’re dealing with. Those inflammatory alopecias are abundant. In my opinion, you have your most common inflammatory alopecia, which is alopecia areata. Now alopecia areata has those circular spots and those can actually evolve into a broader, more robust form of that alopecia. And that actually is alopecia totalis. So alopecia totality is basically from the neck up and that includes eyebrows, eyelashes, facial hair, basically everything on the neck and up. So then the next version of that is called alopecia universalis. So that actually affects the entire body. So you will be hairless and it affects obviously the scalp, it affects the face, it affects the armpits pubic hair, leg hair. Basically it affects the entire body and that is alopecia universalis. Additionally, you have another form of alopecia that is inflammatory or cicatricial alopecia, which cicatricial means scarring. So it’s cicatricial and that is a scarring alopecia. So those alopecia’s unfortunately are not recoverable. So when you are dealing with a scarring alopecia, you’re dealing with something that is going to be like a folliculitis or a lichen planopilaris, these are things that are inflammatory and your hair follicles are actually literally being consumed by your immune system. That leaves an onion like appearance to the surface, the scalp, because it’s sort of this bold gene sort of rippled smooth look, and it has this almost translucent film on the surface of the scalp, or at least it appears that way. And you oftentimes see all sorts of this sort of vascular dilation in those scarring areas. And that is absolutely a problem because unfortunately, there’s nothing that you can do to recover from it. Today, we are going to address the question, “What is alopecia” and how you can do to treat the problem. While many experience hair loss, they don’t understand that the technical term for this condition is called Alopecia. There are treatments to cure alopecia hair loss but first, it’s important to understand what causes the alopecia condition and why. Watch this video to learn more about what alopecia is and how to go about treating it!