January 16, 2002

Hair Pain Does Not Correlate to Hair Loss Activity
By Robert Short


Hair pain in patients presenting with hair loss does not correlate with the activity of hair loss.

Researchers from the department of dermatology at University Hospital of Zurich, in Switzerland, studied 403 patients presenting with hair loss who report that their hair had become painful evaluate the frequency of hair pain and its relationship to hair loss.

In total, 20 percent of women and 9 percent of men reported hair pain, irrespective of the cause and hair loss activity. The researchers found, however, a strong correlation with hair pain among the small group of patients who presented with scalp telangiectasia.

"The symptom neither allows discrimination of the cause nor correlates with the activity of hair loss," the authors write. "A higher prevalence of female patients might be connected to gender-related differences in pain perception in relation to anxiety."

They expressed the opinion that in the absence of any correlation with quantitative parameters of hair loss or specific morphologic changes of the scalp, management of hair pain remains experimental and must be tailored to the individual patient.

Dermatology 2002;205(4):374-377

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