By Mark Salamon, Dec 1, 2017
Here’s an urgent medical news update on the fight to cure baldness. I know you must be beside yourself with excitement at how close we are to a cure. But take a short break from writing donation checks to read the latest report published in the British Journal of Dermatology (1) that shows conclusively that, brace yourself, people lose more hair in the summer and fall than they do in the winter and spring.
Co-author Dr. Shawn Kwatra from dept of dermatology at Johns Hopkins University says that the study came about because “patients often complain that hair loss is more severe in the summer or the fall”. (2) Back in the dark ages of medicine, doctors would have probably just believed these patients. But we are blessed to live in an age of modern medical miracles where doctors were able to tackle this crisis by pouring over volumes of search-volume-index data from Google Trends for the US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Mauritius, use “meteorological definitions to allocate a season to each country”, gather data on monthly temperatures “using information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration”, and estimate how season effects hair loss by using “the Multivariable Prais-Winsten time series”.
After doing all this, their stunning finding was that “Hair loss is more common in summer and fall than in winter and spring”. So all those patients were right all along. Thank God we got to the bottom of that. But don’t worry, we don’t have to stop spending research money on this issue just yet. The team recommends that "future studies should examine physiological changes in human hair during the seasons", so there should be a lot more to come.