Cancer – Hair Loss

Transcript

So the way we grew up learning about chemotherapy or seeing the classic chemotherapy patient was somebody that was really ill and, you know, didn’t have their hair. That is still very much a side effect of chemotherapy, especially when it comes to breast cancer, because you’re getting such high doses that affect the cells that replicate the fastest, that hair is some of those cells, the hair cells replicate fast. So they get affected by chemotherapy, just like the cancer cells that replicate fast. Most of the time the hair does grow back, and usually kind of thicker or curlier in some different way than it was previously. But there are instances about 5% of the time where the hair does not. There is a lot of research that’s going on about different things that you can wear during your therapy, as far as like hats and coldness and things like that. So it’s worth asking your doctor about. But some therapies, especially with colon as well, do result in some degree of hair loss.