If you don’t want to come to terms with your new look and you want to treat baldness, your options are quite limited. You can either rely on drugs or go for surgery – either Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) or Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT). The drugs have had inconclusive results so far, while the transplantation procedures are often very expensive. However, recent research seems to have found an interesting new way to treat hair loss – hair plucking.
So, can you treat hair loss with hair plucking?
Hair Plucking Research
This unconventional technique was first discovered in a 2015 study published in the Cell journal. The scientists explored how hair follicles communicate once we suddenly lose hair. They found that, once hair is plucked in a certain way this triggers a regeneration mechanism called quorum sensing.
The researchers discovered this by plucking hair from mice using different patterns and amounts of hair every time. The medium-density pluck showed the best results, with 1300 hairs growing back after only 200 were plucked in a five millimeter circle.
Implications for Humans
Although mice and humans are genetically similar, there is still no way to say whether this treatment could work on humans. The co-author of the study, Philip Murray, said that we need to do more experiments before we can say that humans can treat hair loss with hair plucking.
A potential downside in this treatment for humans could be that the hairs on the head of a balding man are already too thinly spaced for this technique to help.
Conclusion
Although more research is needed before we can treat hair loss with hair plucking, the first results seem promising. This discovery presents a whole new direction in research on hair loss treatment.
