Lupus and Hair Loss

Lupus is and autoimmune disease that doesn’t involve any external agent acting on the body, rather it is your own body that is acting up against itself. Lupus is more common with females aged 20-30 than to any other age or gender group. Strangely African-Americans and Americans of Asian decent are proportionally more likely to be affected by this disease.

The typical signs of lupus are a prolonged flu-like illness with increasing levels of fatigue. Lupus affects all the organs in the body but only show symptoms mainly in the skin, hair, nails, and mucous membranes. Of most interest to us here is how lupus acts on the hair and how you can try to avoid any undue damage to your hair and also how to care for it during the illness and also when in recovery.

Lupus can cause hair loss in two completely different ways. Lupus will in itself cause hair loss, which we will discuss here first. As mentioned before Lupus is an autoimmune disease where your own body’s immune system acts on other parts of the body. The hair follicles are particularly susceptible to the lupus condition. It is often the first symptom that people will experience at the onset of the disease. They will often notice and increasing number of hairs on their pillows after a nights sleep with many more clogging the bath or shower drain. It is estimated that out of all people diagnosed with Lupus up to 54% will experience some degree of hair loss.

What happens is that the lupus condition will make the body’s autoimmune system go into an overactive mode which will cause your own body’s immune system to attack your hair follicles as if they were a an external entity to your body. This then puts undue stress on your hair follicles which cause them to go into a resting stage and not produce any hair. It is at this stage that the hair will start falling out and now grow back since the hair follicles are in the resting stage and trying to keep itself from being killed by your own body’s overactive immune system.

There really isn’t any distinct sign of hair loss that is caused by lupus as the hair loss pattern is similar to any other hair loss conditions mentioned throughout this site baring male or female pattern baldness. The problem is that hair loss caused by lupus happens in the early stages of the disease so there really isn’t any other sign to indicate that the hair loss isn’t caused by any other condition. The characteristics of hair loss caused by lupus are hair loss evenly from all over the scalp including the body. Sometimes hair in the scalp can also start falling out in patches with red rashes forming called discoid rashes that cause permanent scarring of the hair follicles and sometimes permanent hair loss.

The good news is that most hair loss caused by lupus isn’t permanent and as soon as you start treatment for the condition you should see a reduction in the hair loss and the eventual return of your hair as long as the treatment is appropriate for the lupus and that you didn’t let the condition dwell too long and cause irreparable damage on your hair follicles.

Treatment for lupus normally includes the much rest and a regiment of medication such as cortisteroids, immunosuppressant and anti-malarial medicine. Normally once these medications have been administered the hair loss problem will start improving to the point that it will plateau. Once the condition is under control hair follicles that have not been overly damaged will start producing new hairs within 3 months.