• Question: Are scientists workin gon cures for people with hair loss? such as cancer or alopecia?

    Asked by diffrentbuthappy to Pete, Rebecca, SallyB, Sally, Sian on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Sally Fenton

      Sally Fenton answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      They are definitely working on cures for cancer and I think they are for alopecia aswell. I think that if you have alopecia then there are loads of different types of treatments which can help your hair grow back…but unfortunately their is not cure yet

      When you lose your hair because of cancer it is not because of the cancer itself but it is a side effect of the treatment you go through to help cure it (chemotherapy). So whilst scientists are working to cure cancer unfortunately there is nothing they can do about hair loss during treatment. Not everybody looses their hair when they have this treatment though..and it always grows back :).

      My friends brother had a brain tumour which is a tyoe of cancer and he lost all his hair. Once they had treated it she told him if he ever lost his hair again she would loose it with him and shave all her hair off (her hair reached her bum it was so long!). Unfortunately the cancer came back and he lost his hair again during treatment….so she kept her word and shaved all her hair off! she raised £8,000 for doing it and gave it to a charity for people like her brother!

    • Photo: Rebecca Randell

      Rebecca Randell answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      Yeah people are definitely working on these two things. At the moment no one knows why we develop cancer or how alopecia happens therefore scientists want to find this out so that we can find a cure. It is very expensive to do research on this and very difficult hopefully on day in the future there will be a cure

    • Photo: Sian Lawson

      Sian Lawson answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      The difficulty with alopecia is that a lot of time the cause is not really understood. There are a lot of scientists working on it though.
      With cancer it is actually the treatment that causes the hairloss, and so the hair normally recovers once the treatment stops.

    • Photo: Peter Styring

      Peter Styring answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      All the time. I haven’t really looked at this as all mine started to drop out years ago so it’s a lost cause!

Comments