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Archive for the ‘alopesia’ Category

American researchers have announced that they believe they have discovered the genetic basis of alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes the body to attack its own hair follicles and sufferers to go bald.

The team, from the Columbia University Medical Centre, have discovered that alopecia is more closely related to diseases like celiac disease and type 1 diabetes, rather than inflammatory diseases such as psoriasis as previously thought.

The team took more than 1000 samples from the National Alopecia Areata Registry, an organisation that acts as a patient registry. While studying the samples, the scientists, lead by Dr. Angela Christiano, discovered 8 genes that are root causes of the condition.

The condition can affect men, women and children. Unlike the most common form of baldness, male-pattern baldness, there is not any treatment that is currently available for it. While male-pattern baldness has proved difficult to treat, the medication Propecia – also known as finasteride –  has been shown to be effective. Users report that can stop hair loss and in some cases even encourage re-growth.

However, Propecia does not work to help alopecia, as the two conditions have slightly different base causes. The similarity they share, however, is the extreme distress they can cause to sufferers.

Vicki Kalabokes, CEO of the National Areata Foundation, said, “Hair loss is life-altering – sufferers, especially children, experience social stigma. It affects their quality of life and can lead to long-term psychosocial impact.”

While male-pattern baldness is especially common amongst men when they reach middle age, alopecia can affect people at age. It usually starts as a small, round patch of hairloss on the scalp and can progress to total scalp or body hair loss. In some cases, the hair eventually grows back, though in others this is not the case.

Dr. Christiano, who herself suffers from the condition, hopes that the research by her team may eventually lead to a cure, as scientists better understand the root causes of alopecia. She commented, “It gives us hope, that someday there may be a cure for this condition,” she says. ” It gives pharmaceutical companies a target to go forward and start developing new drugs to fight AA.”

Her teams’ research has particularly raised hopes that it could lead to the development of a treatment to stop hair loss due to the fact that the conditions that they have linked alopecia too, such as diabetes type 1, can already be controlled with existing medications.

The Columbia scientists are now focusing on finding a link between the number of genes sufferers of severe alopecia carry. They are hoping to eventually develop a genetic test which could predict the severity of the disease.