I get a lot of questions about hair regrowth from people who have hair loss or shedding from conditions like telogen effluvium, chronic telogen effluvium, androgenic alopecia, or autoimmune/medical hair loss. Of all these questions, people who have CTE seem to be most upset because they have dealt with this detachment for quite some time. By the time they write to me, the loss has usually been so long that the effects have begun to show. Of course, they want the reassurance that once they can stop the shedding, they will grow their hair back and go on with their lives. I will discuss more about this matter in the following article.

The Clinical Definition of CTE and Why You Should Stop It: You may already know this, but technically chronic telogen effluvium means that you’ve been losing more than 10% of your hair volume (which equates to more than 100 hairs per day for most people) for more than six months. . So obviously losing that much for so long will eventually show up and be noticeable in terms of volume loss and maybe some noticeably thinner areas in some parts of your scalp.

You will most likely regrow hair while this process is taking place, but because you are losing it so quickly, you cannot make any real gains. In other words, your scalp is expelling these hairs before they can contribute to any real improvement. Therefore, it is vital that you can stop this cycle as soon as possible.

Now chronic telogen effluvium is commonly caused by a trigger that you can’t find or can’t seem to fix and this is what makes treating it so difficult. Sometimes it’s a process of trial and error, and slowly trying and evaluating different things until something finally works. And sometimes, unfortunately, the treatments will change our hormones even more or trigger another trigger that only perpetuates the problem. This is why you should move as slowly as possible when trying these treatments and only introduce one thing at a time.

Your hair has probably been growing back all along, but it can’t catch up: What is happening right now is that you are in the middle of a cycle where your hair keeps going into the resting phase and then falls out once again. This really doesn’t have much to do with your regrowth process. It’s actually happening, but you just can’t keep up. You’ve probably been growing your hair all along, only to lose it again. If your loss was due to androgens or DHT, then this cycle would be a little different. Instead, you’d have AGA, and AGA commonly affects both the quality and quantity of your new growth, but chronic telogen effluvium usually doesn’t (unless it’s been going on for so long that AGA has started or started to affect or thwart your follicles.)

In some cases, losing so much hair so quickly will cause some inflammation of the scalp that can affect the follicles and regrowth. If this is the case, there are many things you can do to soothe and heal your scalp. Still, this alone won’t help as much as it should if you can’t stop this cycle from continuing to repeat itself. Your first priority should be to find your trigger and then treat it once and for all, with an eye toward preventing recurrence. Once you are back to stable levels of hair loss, you can address stimulation to your scalp and reduce any inflammation so that your new growth is fast, vigorous, healthy and thick.