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This is a promotional offer that I am making available to readers of BaldingBlog.

As regular readers of this site know, I have not been a supporter of Low Level Laser Therapy (LLLT) in the past. I’ve just not seen these types of products perform as well as claimed, but Dr. Robert Haber is now behind the LaserCap product and wants to prove one way or the other that it works. So with that, we decided we’d offer it to a small number of patients to test it out.

For those that aren’t familiar with the LaserCap, here’s a description taken from the LaserCap site –

“The team behind the LaserCap set out to develop a superior device with the coverage of a dome, but in a portable design. They designed a device that fits in a variety of hats, is powered by a portable battery pack, and contains 224 lasers. The entire target zone is treated throughout the duration of treatment, and the user can perform almost any activity during use, including walking, riding, running, preparing dinner, working, and more.“

Snippet from the article:

Around 200 Bruins and members of the UCLA community dropped by campus for free haircuts Thursday to donate more than 2,300 inches of their tresses to make children’s wigs.

The UCLA Alumni Scholars Club sponsored the fundraiser, partnering for the sixth year in a row with the nonprofit Locks of Love, which turns the hair into wigs for children who have lost their hair due to illness. Long-locked Bruins with 10 or more inches to spare donated their hair with the help of supervised student stylists from the Vidal Sassoon Academy and the Aveda Institute.

Read the rest — Bruins make a difference for children with hair loss

In this video they talk about advances made in dandruff research in relation to studies made on malazzia yeast by P & G researchers and say that their looking for a cure. I know hair is your specialty not skin but do you know if P & G is likely to find a cure or better treatments for dandruff any time soon? I’m not complaining about the current treatments but I would love it if I could cure the dandruff aspect of my seborrhoeic dermatitis someday.

Link to video - YouTube

I’ve embedded the video above for those curious. It appears to be from 2008, but I’m not sure what has come of their research since then. I generally do not treat dandruff issues and I don’t really follow dandruff cure related news bits too closely, as I spend too much time already following up on supposed hair loss cures.

I realize you said you’re fine with the current treatments, but for everyone else — There are a variety of shampoos that are formulated to address dandruff, and it is worth trying a few of them to see what works best for you. Of course, the best thing to do is to see a good dermatologist.

With all of the questions being asked about protein shakes, are there any that you would recommend? Is there any kind of “regular” whey out there. I try to take protein shakes everyday, but I don’t want them is they have steroids in them. I don’t want them if they are similar to steroids. Regular protein is supposed to by good for the hair not hell on the hair.

While I don’t endorse any particular protein shake, I don’t know that they’ve been proven to make hair fall out. Your genetic predisposition makes your hair fall out. Protein shakes are not anabolic steroids.

Snippet from the article:

Andemariam Beyene sat by the hospital window, the low Arctic sun on his face, and talked about the time he thought he would die.

Two and a half years ago doctors in Iceland, where Mr. Beyene was studying to be an engineer, discovered a golf-ball-size tumor growing into his windpipe. Despite surgery and radiation, it kept growing. In the spring of 2011, when Mr. Beyene came to Sweden to see another doctor, he was practically out of options. “I was almost dead,” he said. “There was suffering. A lot of suffering.”

But the doctor, Paolo Macchiarini, at the Karolinska Institute here, had a radical idea. He wanted to make Mr. Beyene a new windpipe, out of plastic and his own cells.

Read the rest — A First: Organs Tailor-Made With Body’s Own Cells

I found this article and was blown away with excitement, so my first instinct was to share this with our readers. Imagine building organs with the help of the body’s own tools. That was done here and saved a life. One day, this will become common, for this I have little doubt.

Snippet from the non-hair-loss article:

Eating food high in fiber may help control the progress of prostate cancer in people who are diagnosed with early stages of the disease, according to a new study.

The study was based on the observation that although prostate cancer incidence in Asian countries is same as in the West, the cancer rarely progress in Asian men. Researchers argue that the high-fiber diet may play a role in keeping the cancer from progressing.

The study was conducted on a set of mice that were either fed with inositol hexaphosphate (IP6), that’s found in high fiber diet or a diet without this component. Then, researchers used MRI to check the progress of the cancer in these mice.

Read the rest — High-Fiber Diet Prevents Prostate Cancer Progression

Snippet from the non-hair-loss article:

The researchers, from the University of California, San Diego and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, performed the study on 92 16- to 20-year-olds. The scientists scanned their brains both before and after an 18-month period. Over the course of the 18 months, half of the teens, who already had an extensive track record with alcohol and marijuana, continued their vices as they had before. The other half continued to abstain or drink a minimal amount, like they too had done before the study.

In addition to the brain scans, the study also required a detailed toxicology report and substance use assessment. The teens also were interviewed every six months. Researchers did not check the teens’ cognitive ability, but simply took brain scans.

The researchers found that, after the year and a half was over, kids who had drank five or more alcoholic beverages twice a week had lost white brain matter. That means that they could have impaired memory, attention, and decision-making into adulthood. The teens that smoked marijuana on a regular basis had no such reduction.

Read the rest — No, Teen Marijuana Use Doesn’t Cause Brain Damage, But Alcohol Does

I’m not advocating marijuana or alcohol, but I thought it was interesting research in light of the pot legalization in Washington state and Colorado. The study will be published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Snippet from the non-hair-loss article:

Her eyelid drooped stubbornly, and the area around her eye was somewhat swollen. Six and a half hours of surgery later, he and his colleagues had dug out small chunks of bone from the woman’s eyelid and tissue surrounding her eye, which was scratched but largely intact. The clicks she heard were the bone fragments grinding against one another.

About three months earlier the woman had opted for a relatively new kind of cosmetic procedure at a different clinic in Beverly Hills—a face-lift that made use of her own adult stem cells. First, cosmetic surgeons had removed some the woman’s abdominal fat with liposuction and isolated the adult stem cells within—a family of cells that can make many copies of themselves in an immature state and can develop into several different kinds of mature tissue.

Read the full article — In the Flesh: The Embedded Dangers of Untested Stem Cell Cosmetics

Yikes. The article goes on to discuss possible dangers of unapproved stem cell treatments and how we should temper our excitement for these types of treatments so that serious illness research isn’t put in jeopardy.

Are people with certain hair colours more likely to go grey as they age? I notice a lot of people with salt and pepper coloured hair but I can’t think of anyone I’ve seen with that level of brown and grey hair, or red and grey hair etc.

All hair colors would generally grey as the person ages. The degree of greying and how fast the person goes grey is dependent on their genetic predisposition. I am not aware if there is a correlation with hair color and going greying.

Would alternating between different shampoos help stop hair loss?

Also, I recently did a homemade minaturization test. I clipped some hairs from my donor zone, and they were thicker than the hairs I clipped from just above my crown. Is that a sign of MPB?

Clipping your hair in different areas will tell you just how much miniaturization you have. The donor area should have the thickest hair, but if you do not have male pattern baldness, the same hair thickness should be every other place (front, top and crown).

As hairs miniaturize, the thickness in some of the hair shafts is finer. This creates a see-through appearance if there is enough miniaturization present.