Hair Loss Treatment

Cell Stress Chaperones. 2008;13:8

Chemotherapy-induced hair loss.
Jimenez JJ,.et al

edited

Hair loss is experienced by thousands of cancer patients every year. Anthracyclines, taxanes, alkylating compounds such as cyclophosphamide and the topisomerase inhibitor etoposide induce substantial-to-severe hairloss. These agents are widely used in the treatment of leukemias and breast, lung, ovarian, and bladder cancers. Currently, no treatment appears to be generally effective in reliably preventing this secondary effect of chemotherapy. We observed in experiments using different rodent models that localized administration of heat or injection of geldanamycin or 17-(allylamino)-17-demethoxygeldanamycin induced a stress protein response in hair follicles and effectively prevented hair loss from adriamycin, cyclophosphamide, taxol, and etoposide. Model tumor therapy experiments support the presumption that such localized hair-loss preventing treatment does not negatively affect chemotherapy efficacy.