What To Do With Your Hair After Chemo? 

When It Comes To Capturing Photographs

When it comes to recent photos to be taken, it may show thereby a lack of imagination or some kind of digital laziness. Is it so hard to take a picture and upload it these days? While many hate having their picture taken, the standard joke comes to be that they are paying for a photogenic childhood along with adulthood. Here to make it look like they have double chins when the shutter clicks, they seem to have their eyes closed or mouth open or head angled. 

Whereas people think they need a new picture seriously, it is just because the hair seems to be growing back wavy past chemo. Here it stuns people as they never had hair that is so straight as they don’t even hold a perm. The strands had begun to flip and twist just because the hairdresser had cut the layers strangely. Whereas by now people realize the hair and not the haircut has changed. 

For the reasons, people searched those scholarly journals as well as magazine databases. Talking to several dermatologists, the amazing thing was why it may regrow differently after chemotherapy was not known by many on how hair grows. 

We never know what goes into making the hair, or in case what goes on in the centre of a flame as well as exactly what happens when we are sleeping, here even if we think as humans, we are so smart. 

Of course, scientists come with a general idea of all these processes. The devil is in the details just as with many things. They haven’t nailed down exactly what genes and cellular mechanisms are involved when it comes to hair growth. Men wouldn’t, therefore, have to worry about male pattern baldness if they did. 

How your hair grows, in general, is here: the vase-shaped structures in the basal layer of your skin, the hair comes from follicles. Producing new cells and skin products, things like saliva, sweat, and hair is this part of the skin. Called stem cells, the follicles house special cells. 

Turning into any kind of cell in the body are some stem cells. Say different types of muscle cells or nerve cells or skin cells others can turn into various kinds of one type. 

Here’s where the mystery comes in so that skin stem cells can thereby turn into any kind of skin cell migrating down into the follicle: the stem cells help the follicle to create a hair bud as by some as-yet-undiscovered cellular or genetic process. A strand of proteins, the bud starts to create hair products. The protein that is your hair grows as it does so. 

The Effect Of Chemotherapy On Hair

That’s why about 70 percent of chemotherapy drugs will cause hair follicles to go haywire as all this hair growing involves cells dividing quickly. 

Dr. Amy McMichael, professor at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, further explains that with significant numbers cycling all the time, hair follicle stem cells are very fast-cycling cells. Knocking off all the cells with fast cycles are chemotherapy agents. 

Your locks end up as collateral damage in the war on your cancer in other words. About 90 percent of your hair is in a growth phase and 10 percent is in a resting phase or in the process of falling out during normal life. The hair stops growing, the strands narrow and then break off as chemo pushes all your hair cells into this resting phase. 

Experts thereby believe that it comes to be very common for the hair to grow back differently when chemo ends. 

Dr. Doris Day, an attending dermatologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan and author of Forget the Facelift, now says how chemo affects the cell cycle was not known. Chemo does seem to affect the hair cycle which is one thing that is observed. The hair may start cycling differently after chemo. 

Doctors further say radical colour changes like the brown hair turning red for instance don’t seem to happen. Whereas straight hair may go curly or curly hair straight. Dark hair may go white or white hair may go dark again. Growing back thicker maybe the hair. It may not grow back at all in rare cases. After a year or two, sometimes the hair reverts to its original colour and texture. While sometimes, it may also not grow. 

To Conclude… 

Patients choose to change their hair colour after chemo as often as a recent New York Times article chronicled. 

The whys and wherefores of these hair changes remain unexplained except for those artificial salon dyes. You never know what you are going to get as maybe it is just one more way that cancer is like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. Or else the reason behind it.