Frontal fibrosing alopecia is a type of scarring hair loss. In this post, you will read more about the symptoms, cause and possible solutions.
With frontal fibrosing alopecia, you mostly lose the hair on the front and the sides of your scalp. Your eyebrows might also partly or completely fall out. There is often redness and flaking around the hair follicles, but this is not always the case. It mostly affects women above the age of 50.
What causes this type of hair loss is that your immune system attacks your hair follicles at the level of the stem cells, and this causes an inflammatory response. The stem cells are the ‘memory’ of your hair - they are normally responsible for ensuring that a new hair is generated when the old one falls out. But with frontal fibrosing alopecia, the stem cells are destroyed. Therefore, the hairs that have fallen out don’t grow back. It is suspected that the inflammatory response has something to do with the changing endocrine system around the menopause, but this hasn’t been scientifically confirmed.
Because the cause of the inflammation isn’t known yet, at the moment the treatment is mostly aimed at suppressing the inflammation through immunosuppressants hoping to slow down the process. The treatment is rather tedious and the results are often disappointing.
