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Re:Arthritis drug spurs hair growth in man with alopecia uni... by mglukhovsky on Wednesday June 25, 2014 @01:29AM (#7942400)
As I understand, what's exciting is that tofacitinib isn't a corticosteroid that we're used to seeing, but a JAK inhibitor -- a class of potential drugs that have a very different approach towards suppressing immune function (specifically targeting cytokine signaling.) Tofacitinib was the first JAK inhibitor to be approved by the FDA. This was a super-interesting paper from 2012 that goes into more detail on JAK inhibitors and why they're interesting: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3419278/

I completely understand your concern about your daughters. I'm lucky that baldness is culturally accepted for adult men (and even encouraged), so I don't feel too self-conscious about alopecia. Hopefully we'll get a better handle on autoimmune conditions with this new class of drugs. Until then, organizations like NAAF (http://www.naaf.org/) are wonderful in helping people with alopecia cope with its medical, emotional, and psychological impact.

Re:Arthritis drug spurs hair growth in man with alopecia uni... by taeric on Wednesday June 25, 2014 @08:16AM (#7943436)
Makes some sense.

Same for me on the cultural acceptance. Though, I was very hesitant to bite the bullet and shave my head completely. I just know that even for me, it was somewhat stressful to have random parts of my hair go missing. Doesn't help that I rarely look at myself in a mirror, so I wouldn't even always know when I was missing more hair. Would just get the occasional, "why did you shave right above your ear?"

Nowdays, though, it is just funny. My legs have spots where I have lost a lot of hair. Some folks assume it is because I bike. Explaining that I will likely lose all of my hair is one that I don't think most folks believe.

At any rate, if it were stressful for me, I can only imagine it would be worse for my daughters. Luckily, to date they have had absolutely none of my difficulties growing up. No allergies or anything.