(CNN)In
his mid 40s, Mike Thomas went bald. Not a "little bald spot in the
back" kind of bald or "receding hairline" kind of bald, but almost
totally and completely bald. He was diagnosed with alopecia areata, an
autoimmune disease, and he was devastated.
He
looked, by his own description, like a "freak," with his eyebrows and
eyelashes completely gone. He could feel it when people looked at him.
Some of them quietly asked whether he had cancer.
"I'm
in the real estate business, and I'm active in my community, but I
started to shy away from people," said Thomas, who asked that his real
name not be used in order to protect his privacy.
"It affects every part of your life. I got very depressed, and it was horrible," he said.
Then, this year, Thomas took a little white pill used for arthritis, and within seven months, his hair grew back.
"It's incredible. I'm so happy to have it back," he said.
What this pill means for men with more common baldness
As part of a study
conducted at Stanford and Yale, Thomas and 65 other alopecia areata
patients took the pill, called Xeljanz, which is prescribed for people
with rheumatoid arthritis, another autoimmune disease.
More
than half of the study subjects saw hair regrowth. A third recovered
more than 50% of their lost hair. In a separate study, nine of 12
patients with alopecia areata recovered more than 50% of hair regrowth
using a similar drug, Jakafi, which is approved for cancer treatment.
Although
researchers say this is potentially great news for people with alopecia
areata like Thomas, what does it mean for men who have hair loss
because -- well, because they're men and they're older?
Thomas'
head may help answer that question. When his hair grew back, he still
had a receding hairline. That's because the Xeljanz pill gave him back
his 47-year-old head of hair, not his 25-year-old head of hair.
"It's incredible," Mike Thomas said of his restored hair. "I'm so happy to have it back."
So
now Thomas' dermatologist, Dr. Brett King at Yale, is trying something
else: rubbing an ointment containing Xeljanz on the heads of men with
alopecia areata.
Will the men grow
back full heads of hair, or will they be like Thomas and many of the
other men in the study and grow back a head of hair with male pattern
baldness?
Dermatologists are deeply
divided between skepticism and optimism. King strongly suspects that
the ointment won't get rid of male pattern baldness. But others are more
optimistic.
Dr. Angela Christiano,
a co-author of the recently published study, had success with Xeljanz
when she made it into an ointment and rubbed it on the skin of mice with
skin engineered to be like the skin of bald men.
Bald mice regrew hair on their right sides but not on their left after being treated with an experimental cream for hair loss.
The ointment was rubbed on the right side of the mice and not on the left, and the results are plain to see.
Though
she thinks men might have the same success with an ointment, she said
the trick is that it has to penetrate properly. Compared with the
paper-thin skin of mice, human skin is "much thicker, and it's oily, and
it's deep, and it's got a fat layer -- so there's a lot to think about
when making a good topical formula," said Christiano, assistant
professor of molecular dermatology at Columbia University Medical
Center.
Why male pattern baldness is so hard to stop
Modern
medicine can treat big cancerous tumors and complicated neurological
diseases; it should be easy to get hair to grow, right?
"You
might think you could just sprinkle something on your head like what
you use to get grass to grow," said Dr. George Cotsarelis, a
dermatologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
But sadly, the physiology of hair growth is much more complicated than that.
King,
an assistant professor of dermatology at Yale, said that with an
autoimmune disease such as alopecia areata, you're essentially trying to
trick the environment surrounding the hair.
"It's
like making a plant in my house think it's springtime when it's
winter," he said. "You just throw a light up in the living room, and it
warms things up."
But with male
pattern baldness, you're dealing with a hair follicle that's pooped out.
"It's like taking a brown plant that's all but dead and bringing it
back to life again," he said.
And
much less money is spent on solving this problem than you might imagine.
"People think major pharmaceutical companies must be spending billions
of dollars on this because the payoff could be so huge, but that's not
the case," King said.
He
said big companies are concerned that the Food and Drug Administration
would approve a treatment for male pattern baldness only if it had no or
few side effects, since it's treating a cosmetic problem and not a
disease. Some men, however, say they suffer psychologically from losing
their hair, especially if it's at a young age.
Cotsarelis,
a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine, is working with
relatively small companies on stem cell therapies for male pattern
baldness and on tissue engineering, which involves growing
hair-producing skin on a tiny scaffolding and then transplanting it back
onto the scalp.
"In the end, I
think there are going to be multiple ways to treat male pattern
baldness, and some will work fabulously well in some people and not so
well in others," Cotsarelis said.
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