I swear, everyone in my part of the US had massive hair shedding around 2018 or so (man and woman, young and old). We speculated at the time that maybe something in the water supply was causing everyone to lose hair in clumps, and by golly this appears to match with our pet theories.
It's common folk knowledge in my trans community that HRT often stops or in some cases partially reverse hair loss. See [1] for a case study, for example. Testosterone is correlated with hair loss and I could see how increasing T would worsen it, but blocking testosterone and increasing estrogen does have the opposite effect.
I'm going off of what the cancer doc has told various family members, especially that they're hesitant to use hormone therapy for cancer patients due to the wide amount of negative consequences that come from getting your hormones out of whack.
Of course, such treatment has many side effects. It's just that hair loss isn't a side effect of estrogen that's common enough that everyone in a town would suffer it. In all likelihood some other cause or contaminant led to this.
Confirm. Had massive hair loss in 2018, up to half my head was bald, the back and sides included. I've been fighting it ever since, with regular injections of steroids required to stop the loss.
I was in upper midwest US, Eastern seaboard, and Los Angeles at various times that year.
That's interesting, which part of the US is it, and does anyone have hard evidence of that trend?
Only one datapoint, but: the outer half of my eyebrows fell out in 2018 just before my digestive issues flared up and I burned out in the spring of 2019. I wondered if maybe radiation from Fukushima affected my thyroid, since radiation levels in southern Idaho were 80 times normal before they quit reporting them.
I've since made a full recovery, but it took 3 years and endless research where it felt like I was losing my wits at times. I feel now that our health actually comes from our gut, so a multivitamin and a daily low-dose "stress" B vitamin, along with twice the water we think we need, and about 4 times the fiber (in the US at least) and greens mix or fresh leafy vegetables, is critical to maintain health in today's age where so much produce is lacking vitamins and minerals due to depleted soils.
I know several people who went through autoimmune issues around that time and now can no longer eat wheat without consequences like weight gain to severe GI distress. I feel like I developed lactose intolerance, so maybe a toxin got concentrated in milk. It's probably just middle age though.
It was everyone I know in Indiana and South Carolina, so it appears to have been wide spread. Some were spared, but this was notably pre-COVID. I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't directly the chemical mentioned in this study, but a multifactor issue. My key point is that out hunch was "what could be leaking into the water or food supply to cause this?" I always leaned more toward the microplastic theory, but that brings us back to endocrine disruption yet again. As for hard evidence, I'm afraid my accounts are colloquial at the moment, but the increase of hairloss products aimed at young men (ie Keeps) should point a curious mind in the right direction.
Another, big reason why hairloss products are aimed at young men is that the current crop of hairloss treatments are drastically more effective if you take them before you undergo any hair loss.
True, but these youth campaigns only started recently. I guarantee you that a rogaine advertisement from the 90s to the 2000s will feature middle aged actors and a narrator with a robust voice.
I just checked Google trends for the phrase "hair loss" localized to South Carolina. The graph doesn't point to any trend that starts in 2018 as far as I can tell. I could be wrong.
UPDATE: I checked for "hair loss" localized to the United States on Google trends. There appears to be an upward trend after 2015. I am not drawing any conclusions, just wanted to point that out.
