Category Archives: Microneedling

Wounding, Follica, Microneedling, Women's Hair Loss

Scalp Wounding for Hair Growth in Females

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A new pilot study on wounding and hair growth just got released online yesterday. The authors found that wounding via Follica’s microneedling device causes new hair growth in women. This is worth reporting because prior research from Follica only entailed studying hair growth in men.

Wounding, Microneedling, Follica and Female Hair Growth
Before and after hair growth photo for wounding via Follica microneedling device in females. Source: International Journal of Women’s Dermatology. Publisher: Elsevier.

In fact, almost all past research on microneedling and hair growth has focused on male pattern hair loss. Balding men are often satisfied with new hair that grows just 1 inch high. Women, on the other hand, often need superior results in order to make for a natural appearance. I did not think that this would be possible via just wounding and intentional scalp injury.

Men are also more likely to be ok with a shaved or thin appearance on the sides and rear of their heads. And of course many men can get away with just shaving their head entirely.

Scalp Wounding Causes Hair Growth in Women

This latest study was undertaken using Follica’s technology. See the company’s press release from today. The lead researchers were based at Harvard University and at Massachusetts General Hospital. The team was led by Dr. Maryanne Senna.

The study showed that wounding leads to at least some hair growth in all women. See discussion further below. All of the 11 females in the study suffered from mild to moderate female pattern hair loss (FPHL).

The main limitation of the study is obviously the small sample size. All 11 patients underwent six treatments with Follica’s Hair Follicle Neogenesis (HFN) device. Each treatment lasts for just a few minutes. The scalp skin wounding creates an “embryonic window” that allows new hair follicles to form from epithelial stem cells.

Two of the patients were also using Spironolactone for their hair loss during the trial.

Minoxidil Addition

The study summary initially states that on non-treatment days, participants applied a topical “on-market” drug. However, later on in the study, it states the following:

“Subjects applied topical minoxidil 5% foam nightly to these areas for the duration of the trial. Topical minoxidil foam was not applied on treatment days.”

So I guess it is Minoxidil and nothing else in Follica’s topical? A lot of online discussion in the past centered around the addition of valproic acid, but this now seems unlikely.

100 Percent Success

  • 10 out of 11 patients reported perceived improvement in hair growth at the end of study.
  • All 11 patients demonstrated improvement in physician-graded Sinclair scores after 4 months. The average improvement in Sinclair grade was slightly more than 1 full integer reduction.

The Sinclair Scale for female pattern hair loss was developed by Dr. Rodney Sinclair of Australia. A more commonly used measure in women is the Ludwig Scale. For men, the most common way to classify degree of baldness is the Hamilton-Norwood Scale.

Also see Follica’s announcement of these findings on Twitter.

According to CEO Jason Bhardwaj, their product has the potential to address both male and female androgenetic alopecia. And this study makes clear that the device works well with both longer and shorter hair.

Follica plans to advance its lead program for male pattern hair loss into Phase 3 trials in 2021.

Microneedling, Follica

Microneedling, Follica and Other Brief Items

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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.