The old adage always said that a woman's hair is her crowning glory, so there's little surprise that when a woman's hair begins to fall out at an alarming rate, she's going to be devastated. We spend a lifetime washing, cutting, curling, and otherwise dealing with our lustrous locks with the intent of causing ourselves to look our best, and thinning hair can cause self-esteem to plummet and our confidence to wane. Woman live their lives with the thought that they are always going to have more hair than men; however, the fact of female baldness is being given more and more attention these days, because it happens to so many women. One of the biggest causes of hair loss in women is medications.
It doesn't matter whether the medication you take is purchased over-the-counter or if it's prescribed by a physician, there are still properties in medications that disrupt the normal hair growth cycles in the body. If you can stop taking the drug or drugs causing the problem, your hair should grow back in without any problem. However, for the thousands of women who are taking specific medications for things like high blood pressure, depression, and even severe allergies, quitting a medication may not be possible as it could put their lives at risk.
Hair loss due to medication usually doesn't start until two to four months from the time you started taking it. Therefore, short-term medications shouldn't have any effect on your hair falling out. Unfortunately, it's the necessary long-term ones that can shorten the growing time of hair and cause it to fall out before it should. Some of the drugs that are known to cause hair loss include:
Anti-hypertensives taken for high blood pressure
Anticlotting drugs
Drugs for specific diseases, such as Parkinson's, Epilepsy, or breast cancer
Birth control pills
Mood stabilizers
Antidepressants
Anti-inflammatory drugs, both steroids and non-steroids
Antibiotics
In many cases there are alternate medications that can be prescribed that may not have the same effect on your hair. Your body may well be more sensitive to some meds than it is to others. Of course, with a lot of these drugs that are causes of hair loss, not taking them could have much more severe consequences than hair loss which means they need to be continued. Even so, there is hope. Products with monoxidil, such as Rogaine, will often help you regrow some of the hair that you have lost due to medications. I can guarantee you that these products are not just a waste of money, because I've been using them for years, and I can always see a marked hair loss if I stop using them.
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