Alopecia Areata

[giggly]

Has anyone ever heard o this or are there any doctors-to-be out there that know what this is? My friend has just been diagnosed with it. She seems so devestated by it and i want to know more about it so i can try and understand whats happening with her! Thankyou everyone!

[Zombie Sheep]

http://cancerweb.ncl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/omd? ... Search+OMD

[hr]Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know we are with you until victory, until Jerusalem.

[tordenskjold]

I thought it could also be a disease where the body rejects your own hair follicles. End up going bald apparently.

[giggly]

Yeah that must be what it is because during the time that she was sitting her exams she began to notice her hair falling out and she went to the doc and he told her that she thought she had Alopecia and that he would refer her to Ninewells. Has anyone else heard of this horrible disease? She is in bits with it...and its so horrible to see her like this. What can they do? Will it keep on falling out? Will it grow back?

[s]tordenskjold wrote on 16:00, 23rd Jan 2005:
I thought it could also be a disease where the body rejects your own hair follicles. End up going bald apparently.

[Thalia]

It's not exactly like it's going to kill her. Some people who lose hair this way can grow it back and some people don't lose all of the hair.
There are treatments but there isn't really a specific cure.

Have a look at this site:

http://www.niams.nih.gov/hi/topics/alop ... ecia.htm#6

[giggly]

[s]Thalia wrote on 23:18, 23rd Jan 2005:
It's not exactly like it's going to kill her. Some people who lose hair this way can grow it back and some people don't lose all of the hair.
There are treatments but there isn't really a specific cure.

Have a look at this site:

http://www.niams.nih.gov/hi/topics/alop ... ecia.htm#6


One of my friends is here and she is close to someone that suffers from this and she has just been explaining it all to me and she would like to say something to you, here she is:
Hi there. You are correct, AA doesnt kill anyone but it might as well do due to the phsycological effects it has on someone especially if they are female. My best friend a year and a half ago began to slowly lose ALL her hair and by christmas she had lost it all - she didnt have one hair on her head and she had lost her eyebrows and eyelashes and all body hair completley. It wrecked her completley she didnt go out she became very withdrawn and she still does and has had to wear hats all of her life since because of what people would say to her. The summer just passed she had to drive up to Ninewells every second monday and go through a course of injections after all the lotions and potions didnt work at all. These injections were like the epipen you get but into her scalp and each time a shot of steriods. I went with her the first time and she had to have 20 injections into her head and seeing her flinch and her tears roll down her cheek at the insertion of each one was heartbreaking. She finished the course and her hair started to grow back as did the hair elsewhere. She grew all her hair back but at the cost of gaining weight. She is now managing to lose the weight but now after 8 months of patience the hair is falling out again and she is back at square one once again. So its not quite as easy as "oh yeah it can grow back" - and just because a disease isnt life threatening it doesnt mean that its life altering consequences can be passed by. I had never heard of this until i had become associated with someone who had it, apparently she said that there are other girls in this university who suffer from it and she met them through councilling meetings. So the next time you see someone hiding behind their hat - they may too be an AA sufferer...

[Thalia]

Yeah, but in quite a lot of cases the alopecia does actually resolve itself over time (although it can come back) - what you're describing in your friend would be diagnosed as alopecia universalis and, since alopecia isn't *likely* (adding this so you don't think that i'm saying it definitely won't happen) to develop into that unless someone has a history of it in their family or developed it at a young age, i didn't think it was necessary to add that in my response to the original poster - especially since they already seemed quite worried - and since it mentions all this on the site i posted anyway.

Yes, it does have psychological effects on people and i'm aware of that but i was assuming that the original poster would already know that too and was only asking about the physcial effects of the disease of which i told her what i'm pretty sure is the case with the majority of people.

[Pender Native]

I had a friend at school whose hair fell out in clumps when she was sitting her Highers because of stress, but it all grew back too.