Yale scientists successfully use arthritis drug to regrow completely bald man's hair!

[Scientalk56]

Bold Legacy's Post

As a semibald guy, I scramble online every now and then looking for that light at the end of the tunnel. So I stumbled on this right now - sorry if it's been already posted.

Yale scientists successfully use arthritis drug to regrow completely bald man's hair

Yale scientists have successfully used an arthritis medication to fully regrow the head and body hair of a almost totally hairless 25-year-old man.

Researchers administered the drug tofacitinib citrate to the unnamed patient, who suffered from the autoimmune baldness disease alopecia universalis.
Within eight months, the man had regrown scalp and facial hair he'd not had in seven years.

'The results are exactly what we hoped for,' said Brett A. King, M.D., senior author of the paper, published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology. 'This is a huge step forward in the treatment of patients with this condition.'


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...mans-hair.html


Thoughts?

[hellouser]

Doesn't alopecia universalis often times reverse on its own, flip flopping between growth and disappearance of hair like Gail Porter? Could it be just coincidence that all of it grew back?

If the tofacitinib citrate drug really is the cause of the regrowth of hair, WHERE do we buy the stuff? I'll pay copious amounts for it.

Working link here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...mans-hair.html

[zephyrprime]

It works by suppressing the Immune system's attack on hair follicles so it probably won't work on people with normal alopecia.

[walrus]

It works by suppressing the Immune system's attack on hair follicles so it probably won't work on people with normal alopecia.

Mast cell are immune cells, and they are also implicated in MPB.

[BoSox]

Why won't this help us? For **** sake. Good for those suffering from this type of hair loss, but for god sake why can't something like this work for us? This is getting irritating.

[hellouser]

Why won't this help us? For **** sake. Good for those suffering from this type of hair loss, but for god sake why can't something like this work for us? This is getting irritating.

Positional Good theory by Fred Hirsch. Look into it.

[PatientlyWaiting]

Why won't this help us? For **** sake. Good for those suffering from this type of hair loss, but for god sake why can't something like this work for us? This is getting irritating.

That type of hair loss is hell...it may grow back, it may never grow back, if it does grow back, it could fall right back, and if it grows back permanently it will be weaker than the rest of the non-affected AA hair. You can't stress at all, if you do, it falls right back, or new patches start to form. There's no slowing it down or stopping it like with MPB in fin/dut/minoxidil. HT doctors will not want to operate on you if you have MPB AND AA.

Trust me, as some one who has suffered from both MPB and Alopecia Areata for a long time, MPB sufferers have way more treatments. I have seemingly eliminated my MBP with an FUE, and using min and dut daily. I can not eliminate my AA at all. The hair that grew back is weak and you can tell patches was there.

Once you have experienced AA, you will see how rough those affected really do have it, especially women. And despite these little reports of hairs growing back with certain meds, none of them are actually proven to work.

[Pate]

This is completely unsurprising, because rheumatoid arthritis and AA/AU are very similar in terms of cause. AGA does involve an autoimmune response, but it's just one component of a very complicated chain of events. So I suspect it may have an effect, particularly in preventing loss in AGA, but I'm not really hopeful it will work in regrowth. We know the lack of regrowth is caused by a breakdown in signalling between stem cells so even if you could stop the inflammation you need to get that signalling restarted. In AA you don't, you just need to stop the immune system attacking its own cells.

That said, it may work, particularly in the early stages where miniaturisation is taking place. The problem is that the anti rheumatic drugs are nasty in terms of sides, amongst other things they significantly increase the risk of heart attack.

So of anyone wants to try this, make sure you research the hell out of the sides. I don't know how this dose compared to the standard dose for RA, and they say the guy had no sides, so maybe it was lower, but the cardiovascular sides generally take years to develop.

I know a bit about this as I had an RA scare recently. Joints on my fingers flared up. The tests thankfully all came back negative, although I still may have an early stage of it that hasn't progressed enough to show up, but my doctor thinks it's unlikely. Suffice to say reading about the drugs, including this one, used to treat RA really freaked me out, and at one stage I remember thinking that if I had to choose between baldness and RA I would choose baldness any day.

IIRC there is actually a guy who has posted to this forum who has RA and has been taking drugs for it for years, and said it didn't help his hair loss at all.

Anyway, if someone wants to try it, make sure you understand what you're taking. A low dose for a few months may be okay. But I for one am not going anywhere near this one.

[hellouser]

IIRC there is actually a guy who has posted to this forum who has RA and has been taking drugs for it for years, and said it didn't help his hair loss at all.

Cases like that need to be exposed.

[JulioGP]

The results are really impressive. I believe that is really efficient for AA, this is the most amazing news of recent times.