NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - There is no good evidence for any long-term benefit of any treatments now available for patchy hair loss, a type of baldness called alopecia areata, the authors of a review of current research on the subject conclude.
"There is a desperate need for large, well-conducted studies that evaluate long-term effects of therapies on quality of life," Dr. Mike Sladden of the University of Tasmania in Australia and colleagues write in the current issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of the Cochrane Collaboration, which publishes systematic reviews of the effectiveness of medical practice.
People with alopecia areata lose patches or clumps of their hair, and in some cases may lose all the hair on their head or body, Sladden and his team explain. Most patients begin to lose their hair before the age of 20. The condition may improve on its own, it can get worse, or it may improve and then become worse again.
Some studies suggest that alopecia areata is an autoimmune disease in which the body's immune system attacks the hair follicles. Other researchers have linked some cases to stress; and still others have no known cause. It is estimated that the condition affects up to 1.7 of the population.
Current treatments include corticosteroids applied to the skin or taken orally, light-based therapies, and minoxidil (Rogaine), the researchers add. To investigate the effectiveness of these treatments and others, they searched the literature for randomized controlled trials, coming up with 17 including a total of 540 people.
The number of participants in the trials, which tested corticosteroids given topically or orally, topical cyclosporine, topical minoxidil, and light therapy, ranged from 6 to 85.
None of the treatments evaluated were any better than placebo, the researchers found. And there were no randomized trials of several commonly used treatments for alopecia areata, including the immunotherapeutic drugs diphencyprone and dinitrochlorobenzene, or dithranol, which is used to treat psoriasis.
