Does Smoking Affect Hair Loss?

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So there's a question about whether smoking will affect someone's hair loss. And there is a very strong association between smoking and hair loss. How smoking affects hair loss is thought to be multifactorial. First of all, smoking can affect your blood vessels. If you have less blood flowing your hair and scalp, your hair will be less nourished. Therefore you'll have less hair growing. Um, if you think about minoxidil, the sole purpose of minoxidil is to increase vasodilate the blood vessels. And what smoking does is sort of reverses the effects of minoxidil or blood flow. So it's going to, um, prevent your, um, hair from getting nourished. It also directly affects the DNA of the hair follicle. So that little papilla, the little nerve center of that, um, or genetic center of the hair that tells it to grow or not grow. This is going to get damaged with some of those, um, we'll call them genitotoxins of smoking, and that can also cause the DNA of the hair follicle damage and affect that.

Um, and so for, for people who are smoking and wanting another reason to quit smoking, um, uh, hair loss is another one of those. If you quit early enough, there are some studies showing that some of the hair will grow back. And this is probably thought to be some of those, um, uh, damage to, uh, oxidants and stress to the hair and stress. Um, early stress hair loss that's caught can be reversible. So if you're kind of putting this into one big picture, live a healthy lifestyle, avoid stress, avoid stresses that we can control like smoking and try to avoid mental stress, because this all affects hair. If you're having difficulty with stress, consider taking something like, uh, uh, ashwaganda, turmeric, um, this can be built into some of those nutraceuticals like, um, uh, Nutrafol and then, uh, live that healthy lifestyle. And uh, if you want further hair growth, that's when you can actually look at some hair treatments, um, uh, like hair transplantation, exosomes, P R P, and so forth. Thank you.