Cooling caps to reduce hair loss after chemotherapy make the biggest wave in hair loss news this month.
Cooling Caps for Hair Loss
— Breast cancer patients often complain about hair loss being the most difficult part of chemotherapy. A good recent article on this issue. Note that Swedish made DigniCap cooling cap was FDA cleared early last month.
According to the company’s website:
“The NCCN Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines®), European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO), and Cancer Australia recognize scalp cooling as a treatment recommendation to reduce the incidence of chemotherapy-induced alopecia for breast cancer and ovarian cancer.”
More on cooling caps and scalp hypothermia to reduce hair loss after chemotherapy treatments.
— Make sure to see my updated list of the best danduff shampoos in the world. There are many other options besides the renowned Nizoral.
— My post from last year on the ligature of scalp area arteries to prevent further hair loss was not too popular when it comes to number of reader comments, even though I thought it was a fascinating subject. Yesterday, someone named Peter Renardo posted an extraordinary account of his positive experiences after having this procedure done on himself 30 years ago! A must read as far as user comments go. Having said that, please do not ever get this procedure done.
— Perhaps not immediately relevant to hair loss research, but scientists have developed an algorithm that can predict the factors required to convert one human cell type to another. This could have major implications for regenerative medicine. More importantly, the creator of the computational algorithm, Dr. Owen Rackham, has made a publicly available site called mogrify.net on which you can find the cellular factors required for cell conversions. I tried doing the dermal papilla cell to hair follicle cell conversion, but got two different results. A user named “InBeforeTheCure” on hairlosstalk also tried the same thing and saw results that were different to my two results.
And now on to medical items of interest:
— Who will finally get the Nobel prize for discovering CRISPR (a guaranteed event in most scientists’ minds)? Will they change the regulations and for the first time ever award more than three scientists?
— China was in the news a lot in 2015 due to it being the first to use CRIPSR on human embryos; creating genetically modified micropigs; using gene editing to create extra muscular dogs; and planning to soon open the world’s largest animal cloning factory.
— Maybe even more spine chilling. The somewhat creepy Dr. Canavaro might well be correct that a human head transplant (more accurately full body transplant) is possible within the next several years. Apparently a monkey head transplant was recently successful, although they only kept the animal alive for 20 hrs due to ethical reasons. This is real animal cruelty.
— Printable organs are closer than ever. Perhaps a hyped up title.
— Would you pay $100,000 to clone your pet? My answer is “no way” even if I was a billionaire.