Chih-Chiang Chen from National Yang-Ming University and Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan working at the University of Southern California and Arthur D. Lander from the University of California at Irvine have developed a method of hair restoration that is initiated by pulling hairs. The discovery is based on the human body’s immune response.
Chen discovered that hair follicle injury produced an immune response that could result in hair growth. The growth of new hair was not restricted to the area where the follicle injury occurred. Chen developed a program of hair pulling in mice to test the effects of a natural cure for male pattern baldness.
Chen found that pulling up to 200 hairs in an area of six millimeters circumference did not produce the desired hair growth response. Pulling 350 to 1,200 hairs in a circular pattern where the extracted hairs were three to five millimeters apart did produce hair restoration and it produced hair growth in areas where no hair had been extracted. The researchers found that pulling hairs in the right pattern caused a release of tumor necrosis factor alpha by immune cells in sufficient quantities to produce hair growth in areas where hair had not been removed.
The discovery could lead to an inexpensive treatment for male pattern baldness compared to present treatments. The immune response may be used to combat other serious diseases. Potentially, removing diseased cells from a given organ in the right pattern could produce a similar growth of healthy cells to replace the diseased cells.
