Re: I dont think DHT is the cause of hairloss

tooyoung Tue May 15, 2012 3:55 am

a
By no means stop excercising, but look into HIIT. I lost the most hair during the period when I ran, it's very stressful on the body. A lot of runners have some nasty, nasty problems later in life.

When you say "runners", do you mean sprinters, long distance runners or both?

a<r Tue May 15, 2012 4:01 am

Long distance, sprinting as far as I have read can be good, and also possibly considered HIIT as long as you have the "Interval" part of High Intensity Interval Training.

niff1250 Tue May 15, 2012 6:09 am

aWhen it comes down to what we're trying to do, effort doesn't always = results. Keep in mind the saying "work smart, not hard".

By no means stop excercising, but look into HIIT. I lost the most hair during the period when I ran, it's very stressful on the body. A lot of runners have some nasty, nasty problems later in life.

If you do some searches of this site on soy and legumes like lentils, you might reconsider eating them. I don't let the stuff touch my skin let alone my mouth.

It's excess androgens in my experience when it comes to body hair, but I've stopped worrying about directly cutting down the androgens, if you simply cut down estrogen all your testosterone can go directly to the Sex Hormone Binding Receptors without any competition and do no damage. Insulin Resistance also cuts down on those receptors, causing sex hormone imbalances, so yes it definitely does have everything to do with metabolism and inflammation. Personally when I lose weight and improve my insulin profile / metabolism, my body hair goes down.

What are you using to chelate and how much are you taking?

With masturbation, it's probably the stress that does the most "damage".

I'm going to check HIIT. As regards soy, I've heard it's good as long as it is fermented. For lentils, I don't consume that much but I might reconsider it.

Yes excess androgens is probably my main concern. I'm almost sure my hormonal profile is : low SHBG, low testosterone, high free testosterone.
I should make some tests to confirm that intuition.
How do you cut down estrogen ?
Also I'm very skinny, I need to gain weight not lose it but that probably doesn't mean insulin isn't a problem for me.

jcreely Tue May 15, 2012 6:39 am

niff1250 wrote:
a
I've been on this forum for a couple of years now, and this needs to be said.

Despite I haven't posted that much, I too have been immersed on hairloss forums for the last 2 years.

a
Every year at about this time there is a wave of new users here on this forum, and almost every year its been the same.

A third of the new users, with little to no justification or knowledge to back them up, will say "Hair loss is unbeatable because ___________ and I've never ever seen anybody get any results using ____________, _____________, or ______________".
I must confess : I've never seen anybody getting regrowth after using a natural approach. And that statement doesn't make me a newbie, it's quite the opposite : in my years of being involved I've seen no truly convincing pictures of regrowth. And if you think I'm wrong, please show me some sucess stories or at least just one, ideally documented with photos. Yes, some members, for example The Natural, have been able to stabilize hairloss and get some regrowth. But this isn't the kind of regrowth you can expect from propecia.

a
A third of the users will be absolutely upbeat, positive, aggressively determined, and will have a kickass attitude that says "Hey, I don't care whether or not anybody has ever gotten any results, I'm going to be the first". These users also often move beyond the previous group by digging through old threads here on this forum, and seeing what hairloss actually is and isn't on a purely pathological level, without any media or enterprise based influence.

Trust me : this was really my line of thinking. And I had good reasons to think that way : First there's no history of baldness in my family and 2nd my lifestyle was EXTREMELY bad (smoking pot all day, junk food, no exercising for the last 10 years etc).
My thought process was : stop crying over your hairloss, just do the best you can, this unexpected premature hairloss is a warining sign, it's time to take care of yourself etc
"Hey, I don't care whether or not anybody has ever gotten any results, I'm going to be the first." -> This was exactly my line of thinking especially considering my background (no hairloss from both sides of my family).

I did the best I can : I gave up smoking both cigarettes and marijuana (just doing that was very hard), started exercising (running, swimming x3/week), eating organic food, cutting out sugar and dairy, Tom Hagerty's scalp exercises to boost scalp circulation, all sort of natural oils for my scalp, the top6, resveratrol and curcumin (antagonists at the CB1 receptor to reverse marijuana damage and inflammation), meditation and sauna to reduce stress etc. I even tried other approaches like ericksonian hypnosis to feel better emotionally.
You can't imagine how self-motivated I was. Claiming I'm just an ignorant new user is just unfair. I really did my homework to understand the cause of my hairloss. I read studies about premature vertex baldness and other health problems (insulin resistance, prostate cancer, cardio vascular diseases)

I'm very proud of myself about theses changes, the information on this site is really great, during the last year I was feeling REALLY good both physically and emotionally. I don't regret it.
But when it comes to my hair, nothing has changed. My hairloss rate hasn't increased during that time but it hasn't decreased either. It's just getting worse and worse.

Obviously I haven't tried everything but at this point I don't think adopting free-gluten diet, considering LLLT or whatever is going to change that much.

I have seen ar pic and he has a tremendous head of hair (you can see at ZX42 post). Others on here do as well. you sound like you have a lot of dedication. you may just need to focus that dedication toward things that work. good luck to you friend!

a<r Tue May 15, 2012 6:54 am

When it comes to soy, there's so much craziness going on with it that unless I know where it was fermented I just avoid it unless it's some Miso soup at a Sushi place sometimes.

Cutting down estrogen, it's been definitely talked about a lot on here, and if you do some quick google searches you'll get more info than I can personally remember in regards to it ... but Iodine, chelation, removal of food factors, reducing inflammation, sweating and removing adipose tissue, etc.

When people are skinny and having these symptoms, I'm always reminded of the japanese and african studies that shed light on how people can "look" healthy, yet still be metabolically haywire. When they took these groups of people from such places, it was very clear (due to less factors that cloud results like american diet, etc) that there was a strong correlation between metabolic stress and H. Pylori infection. That is just one subset of studies (of which I've posted many of) that focuses on one pathogen, when you look at other studies that use similar groups and similar illnesses but look for a different pathogen such as Chlamydia Pnumeonia you get a very similar correlation. This is due to the nature of bacteria basically aiding eachother survival to in turn ensure their own, biofilm comes into the picture here. So you're right, being skinny doesn't mean no insuline resistance.

SlowMoe Thu May 17, 2012 3:26 am

A
Out of curiosity, how bad was your hairloss at it's worst?
And I'm assuming it was androgenetic, correct?

a<r Thu May 17, 2012 5:13 am

Coming out in handfulls pretty much, it would just stream off of my scalp after showering.

Things I was definitely doing wrong that can be immediately helped for beginners -

I was eating way too many nuts.

I was running instead of less stressful exercises.

Eating Soy.

Not getting enough salt / right kind of salt.

Not taking Iodine.

Eating a mostly plant based diet.

Eating all my meat cooked.

Again, my best success came during and after controlled fasting plus high dose chelation, what I also noticed was that if you are aggressive enough in a regimen like that, your results will be exponential and instigate some sort of shit within your body that can go on for an indefinite period afterwards.

After the first couple of weeks of my regimen, I start having extreme fevers with hallucination everynight, I've never felt anything like it. Everytime this happened I felt stronger afterwards, and at one point my hair count in the shower was zero to maybe two. Up to almost a year later I was still having these episodes of freak immune reactions, especially after subjecting my body to sunlight again, which I couldn't tolerate well for a long time. It would be fever ... body aches would come ... fever ... body aches go away, develops sudden psoriasis on elbow ... fever ... psoriasis goes away, develops super hyper energy for some reason and stops sleeping ... fever ... etc. Very interesting stuff. This is all just to show everybody that what you need to do, is not try to do the thing that others have done and expect the same results, but to find through educated trial and error what will be the kicker for you.

SlowMoe Thu May 17, 2012 6:24 am

Is there a good cheap way to chelate heavy metals? I was looking into EDTA suppositories but they are so damn expensive... Also to what extent do you recommend chelation?

tooyoung Thu May 17, 2012 7:53 am

aI was running instead of less stressful exercises.

What exercise are you doing now? Just weights?

a<r Thu May 17, 2012 8:12 am

I have a buttload of edta suppositories (totally mature sense of humor gentlemen) and frankly while IV edta as well are both amazing, for the purposes I use chelation for what you want is modified citrus pectin. Its not terribly expensive on iherb either, you want to do it on an empty stomach during the middle of a daytime fast, and avoid all starch as much as possible. Humifulvate has great synergy with mcp as well, so does iodine and magnesium.

Hey tooyoung, I do some mild yoga stretching for ten minutes each night and then pushups, crunches, thigh lifts, and dunbell training until I feel like it would be a good time to stop. I do it in short bursts as well, three minutes of intense endurance, three of deep breathing, etc.

tooyoung Thu May 17, 2012 8:26 am

aHey tooyoung, I do some mild yoga stretching for ten minutes each night and then pushups, crunches, thigh lifts, and dunbell training until I feel like it would be a good time to stop. I do it in short bursts as well, three minutes of intense endurance, three of deep breathing, etc.

Sound similarish to me, I do stretches on a night when I remember, not particularly for any health reasons other than I'm terrible inflexible. I do a weight session, usually 30-45 mins at the gym 3x per week, no cardio.

I noticed you mentioned fasting above, do you not think that fasting stresses the body?

a<r Thu May 17, 2012 10:49 am

Fasting defintely stresses my body, I'm sure some can pull it off rather well but not all. It depends how long you do it, I find day fast on nothing but water and some salty broths and natural fruit juices to be fine though.

blueman99 Thu May 17, 2012 10:52 am

I used to do a ton of long distance running, nowadays all i do is weightlifting a couple times a week a sprints. Gained a lot more muscle and have more energy as well.

987 Thu May 17, 2012 12:23 pm

Quick question, with these chelations and metal detox's, after you've done it, how do you know it was done properly or to
a significant extent? In what way is it measurable?

LawOfThelema Thu May 17, 2012 1:01 pm

There will be no singular "cause" for hair loss ever found. Clearly DHT plays a role in the diffuse, complex, causal networks involved in the formation and expression of the condition, probably a strong one even. But is it the "ultimate cause", probably not, but then there probably isn't one. Anyone who say that this or that one thing is the cause is probably wrong, and probably knows little about actual biology. This is a theoretical issue generally for living systems. They are not as easy as simple physical systems or as single chemical reactions. This was observed as far back as Kant. There is a teleological character to a living system which makes the use of reductive domino chain cause and effect treatments resistant. The "effects" can themselves be causes. Living systems are complex, heterogeneous, dissipative systems with the most intense recursive feedback pathways found anywhere in the known universe. Don't expect their pathologies to be easy to understand in terms of simple cause and effect relations.

LawOfThelema Thu May 17, 2012 1:03 pm

^^ what evidence is there that heavy metal toxification has anything to do with androgenic alopecia. I have not seen this type of speculation anywhere except for this site, and when it is referenced elsewhere they refer back to this site. What research supports this notion. I don;t mean to be dismissive, but am genuinely curious about this line of inquiry.

tooyoung Thu May 17, 2012 1:04 pm

LawOfThelema wrote:^^ what evidence is there that heavy metal toxification has anything to do with androgenic alopecia. I have not seen this type of speculation anywhere except for this site, and when it is referenced elsewhere they refer back to this site. What research supports this notion. I don;t mean to be dismissive, but am genuinely curious about this line of inquiry.

metals>thyroid>hair loss

Would be one way.

a<r Thu May 17, 2012 2:09 pm

It's all about inflammation, and the poisoning of enzymes involved in key metabolic processes. The heavy metals in question also steal electrons, oxidizing needed elements in our body so that they are biounavailable. For those versed in the science behind the gut flora and metabolism, it's been demonstrated that abnormalities in gut bacteria cause problems detoxing bad metals, and that bad metals can also cause damage to the gut. Bacteria also thrive around metal deposits and need certain metals to survive, namely oxidizers, like mercury and iron. There's no one reason why metals can aggravate metabolic problems / hairloss, especially when it comes to the thyroid like tooyoung said.

a<r Thu May 17, 2012 2:20 pm

Also, metals are a key component in biofilm, which is a whole other ball game and you get into the understanding of what makes chronic inflammitory conditions, chronic.

a<r Thu May 17, 2012 3:52 pm

J987 wrote:Quick question, with these chelations and metal detox's, after you've done it, how do you know it was done properly or to
a significant extent? In what way is it measurable?

Didn't even see this post, sorry. The answer would vary from individual to individual. My best advice would be to try different forms of chelation in different doses, etc, find one that you notice a difference on and keep experimenting, tweaking, you'll know that you found something that's right for you when you feel worse, then better from taking something usually.

ViolatedBird Wed May 23, 2012 1:23 pm

aAll the factors involved can not be looked at individually, they are weave in and out of eachother and affect the entire process often in dozens of ways, for instance a certain cytokines effect on circulation can exponentially increase that said cytokine by the other dozen factors affecting and affected by the circulation compromise. It's like that with everything in the body, androgens and estrogens are as much Immune involved depending on the situation as they are involved in sexual metabolic actions. DHT is a "result of", as much as a "cause of", and frankly can be completely ignored in the long run when looking at this from a purely pathological perspective. They said DHT caused prostate cancer, turns out its a murine virus that actually has sex hormone receptors that can live in the prostate which is one of the main causes along with estrogen, I feel that when we finally can break hairloss down to a direct abstract in purely digestable terms, it'll be similar to that story.

$I dont think DHT is the cause of hairloss - Page 2 X-Zibit-Meme-On-Understanding-Math-And-Science$

How is it a murine virus?

Murine means that it is related to rodents...

a<r Wed May 23, 2012 2:03 pm

Should have been more precise.

"Xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) is a gammaretrovirus that was first described in 2006. Initial reports linked the virus to prostate cancer

XMRV belongs to the virus family Retroviridae and the genus gammaretrovirus. It has a single-stranded RNA genome that replicates through a DNA intermediate. Its name refers to its close relationship with the murine leukemia viruses ("MuLVs"). The genome, approximately 8100 nucleotides in length, is 95% identical with several endogenous retroviruses of mice, and is 93-94% identical with several exogenous mouse viruses.[1]"

tooyoung Wed May 23, 2012 3:21 pm

ar - Howcome you make a new account when you get near 1000 posts?

a<r Wed May 23, 2012 3:30 pm

At 800 posts your old posts get essentially deleted, I like to document and keep studies and old thread material for newer users and for my own personal use.

ViolatedBird Thu May 24, 2012 6:45 am

While it is useful to look father down the pathway and see where ELSE we can interrupt the process of male pattern hair loss, I don't understand why we try to downplay the role of DHT.

We know:

- Women do not normally experience MBP without hormonal disorders that create excess androgens and thus excess DHT. One example syndrome is PCOS, in which women can grow beards and lose hair just like men (both which are androgenic symptoms of DHT.)

- Eunuchs do not experience MBP, due to lack of androgens and thus DHT.

- Endocrine disruptors that inhibit the action of 5-AR (and thus reduce systemic DHT) have all been proven to show some efficacy in preventing or reversing MBP.

- Disorders in men that increase the FT:TT ratio and thus increase the TT:DHT ratio can lead to very rapid male pattern hair loss. Such a disorder is insulin resistance, which involves low SHBG, which causes excess FT->DHT conversion. Moreoever, DHT preferentially binds to SHBG with 3 times the affinity of T, making SHBG vital in buffering the effect of DHT. It is this relationship that leads us to the mistake that disorders such as insulin resistance lead to increased balding due to virtue of "unhealthiness." The real relationship is that IR increases free androgens well beyond what the body should experience.

Finally, it is known that a particular SNP on the X-linked androgen receptor (AR) gene is a pre-requisite for MBP. You can harbor all the candida, inflammation, sebum, mercury toxicity, gingivitis, fluoride and negative karma that is possible to harbor and still not lose a single hair to MPB. Granted, your hair won't look quite as healthy and may diffusely thin, but it won't fall out in the same pattern or with the same finality as genuine MBP. There have been interesting discussions related to the prevalence of old homeless men with unusually thick and full heads of hair, to the point of the inclusion of juvenile hairlines. These men eat old donuts from dumpsters.

DHT is the cause. "Other causes" of AGA/MPB are simply the result of a cascade that DHT initiates. It is useful to understand what DHT causes to happen so that we can perhaps catch the progression of the hair loss at the second or third stage of the process. However, I do not think is not useful to downplay the role of DHT.

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