Thanks to commentator “Karl” for posting a link to a new study from China regarding electrodynamic microneedling in the comments to my Indian microneedling post from August.
Microneedling and Follica
Yet again, microneedling seems to lead to significantly increased hair growth when used in conjunction with Minoxidil versus when using just Minoxidil by itself.
However, even more interesting, microneedling by itself led to more hair growth than Minoxidil by itself in this study. Totally crazy that wounding works better than one of the only two ever FDA approved hair loss treatments. The other being Finasteride. Of course more such results need to be emulated before this becomes believable.
Follica has for a long time claimed that skin disruption in and of itself leads to new de novo hair follicle growth. In the India microneedling post, “Karl” made an interesting lengthy comment related to the above study, and it is worth a read in its entirety. I will paste part of it related to needling depth here:
“Personal observation: that difference of 1.5mm to 2.5mm might seem small, but if you’ve ever done it, you know that it’s HUGE. 1.5mm hurts a lot already, and for some people is borderline unbearable. 2.5mm is getting into torture level lol. Pity they weren’t more specific about their procedure. The question of depth, wounding, and scarring seems an open question in research afaik and is discussed frequently on forums”.
Other Hair Loss News this Month
— In August, I covered groundbreaking new research related to successful hair regeneration in mice. The work was led by scientists from USC (in particular, Dr. Mingxing Lei and Dr. Cheng-Ming Chuong). For some reason, a new CNBC article on this now relatively old news appeared in October and became the most widely covered hair related story this month. Three different people posted the exact same CNBC link in the comments to the last post. To be fair, even people on Reddit Futurology seemed to think that this was a new development.
— Samumed added a new page on its site regarding the status of each of its clinical trials.
— Replicel’s hair loss work covered in Forbes magazine.
— Fecal matter transplant regrows hair in two alopecia areata patients.
— Dr. David Saceda has been responding to questions by “Tim” in my messotherapy with dutasteride post.