Anemia Hair Loss: Iron Deficiency, Low Ferritin, and Hair Thinning

Anemia Hair Loss and Iron Deficiency Hair Loss. How does it happen? What can you do to fix it? Iron deficiency and hair loss or anemia and hair loss. This is one of those items that I feel as though in the hair loss world, people just straight up overlook the vast majority of the time. There are so many cases that I’ve run into that somebody has tried everything. They’ve tried minoxidil, they’ve tried Propecia, they’ve tried PRP or vitamins or whatnot and nothing worked and essentially they end up in my office and I do our very standard blood test, ferritin, vitamin D3, blood type and it comes back that their ferritin is low and their ferritin is their iron storage protein. If that’s low and what I mean by low is essentially less than optimal, that can be a massive influence in the loss of hair and essentially prevent you from growing hair back. When you’re looking at everything, people think of just iron, but they have to think of ferritin because ferritin is your iron storage protein. To get a little bit more involved in this, iron is a vital substance for our body. Without it we cannot live. It is 70% of what actually makes up hemoglobin, which is our red blood cells. It transports oxygen throughout the entire body and collectively we have to have a pretty substantial amount of iron in our diet to keep our bodies working properly. When we are looking at this scenario for hair loss, we have two major blood tests that we look for to understand how iron or ferritin is influencing your hair. When you’re going to get a blood test, oftentimes your standard blood test is simply not going to give you the information you need to know if ferritin or iron is influencing your hair. You must get a serum iron blood test and a ferritin blood test to know exactly where you’re at. You might have some additional symptoms that would allow you to key into that. If your iron is very low, you’re also going to have symptoms like bruising easily, fatigue, lightheadedness, you’re also going to run into potentially heart palpitations, but if your ferritin is low, you might not have any of those or any of those physical symptoms, you might just have hair loss. Again, that’s why you need to get both of those blood tests. Each individual is going to have a little bit of a different daily requirement of iron-based on their lifestyle factors, but some key demographics that are going to have more demands for iron would be a menstruating female. As soon as a woman obviously begins to menstruate, losing a very large amount of blood on a monthly basis becomes a key factor, an overwhelming need for iron because when you lose that blood, you’re actually going to end up pulling from your ferritin stores to rebuild all of those red blood cells that you just lost. If that’s happening over and over and over again, it can easily diminish ferritin. Most of the females that I see in their teens, they’re actually losing hair due to ferritin or iron issues. Iron and hair Loss and Ferritin and Hair Loss. Today, we are going to be discussing iron deficiency and hair loss– or anemia and hair loss– specifically, the effects and what you can do about the problem. Many people have tried everything under the sun to correct this problem from certain over-the-counter drugs to daily vitamins and yet, nothing worked. Essentially, they ended up in my office taking Vitamin D 3 tests which have led to the answer they were looking for. Watch this video to learn what the cause of iron deficiency and hair loss may be for you and how to overcome it!