A follicle refers to a crust or cavity from which the hair emerges on the surface of the skin. The term folliculitis is used to describe the inflamed condition of the hair. Depending upon the causal organism, folliculitis causes can be characterized as follows:
>Bacterial Folliculitis
>Fungal Folliculitis
>Viral Folliculitis
>Parasitic Folliculitis
Bacterial folliculitis
Bacterial folliculitis develops when bacteria enters the body through a cut, scrape, surgical incision, or multiplies in the skin near a hair follicle. The bacteria can get trapped and the infection may spread from the hair follicles to the other parts of the body.
Bacterial folliculitis may be superficial or deep. Superficial folliculitis, also called impetigo, consists of pustules which are small-circumscribed elevations of the skin containing pus. The pustules are often surrounded by a ring of redness. Deep folliculitis results when the infection goes deeper and involves more follicles to produce furuncles and carbuncles. These are more serious than folliculitis and can cause permanent damage and scarring to the skin.
Bacterial folliculitis usually occurs in children and adults. Staphylococcus aureus is the most common of bacterial folliculitis causes. It also causes sycosis, a deep chronic infection that involves the entire hair follicle. Read more…
On average, people lose about 10% of their hair during a resting phase. Then after about three months, resting hair falls out and new hair begins to grow. The phase of new growing hair typically lasts anywhere from two to six years with hair growing about one-half to one-inch per month. The interesting thing is that as much as 90% of hair on your head is growing at any given time.
Shedding hair is a normal process. In fact, on a normal day, you would lose about 100 hairs although more if you were actually going through significant hair loss. Now, hair loss is usually associated with men but women can also go through hair loss. The cause of excessive hair loss could be a number of things. For starters, if you have undergone major surgery or illness, you might lose more hair for the following three months than you normally do because of stress.
Another common cause of excessive hair loss is due to hormonal changes within the body. This in itself could be from several things such as having a baby, dealing with an under or overly active thyroid, having estrogen or androgens out of balance, and so on. Then, certain types of drugs can also cause hair loss. In this case, once the medication is stopped, the excessive hair loss usually stops as well. The most common culprits include blood thinners, chemotherapy, excessive vitamin A, antidepressants, gout medication, and birth control pills. Read more…
The term “trichotillomania” comes from the Greek words “thrix,” meaning “hair” and “tillein” meaning “to pull” and “mania,” the Greek word for “madness” or “frenzy”. As the name suggests trichotillomania is a psychiatric condition in which an individual has an uncontrollable urge to pull out his or her own body hair. For people suffering from trichotillomania, hair pulling is more than a habit. It is rather a compulsive behavior, which the person finds very hard to stop. The cause of tricholomania is supposed to be the imbalance of chemicals in the human brain.
People with trichotillomania pull their hair out of the root from places like the scalp, eyebrows, eyelashes, or even the pubic area. Some people even pull handfuls of hair, which can leave bald patches on the scalp or eyebrows. Other people pull out their hair one strand at a time. Some inspect the strands after pulling them out or play with the hair after it’s been pulled. About half of people with this condition also have the habit of putting the plucked hair in mouth.
Trichotillomania has been mentioned as a disorder in very early historical records. But clinically the condition trichotillomania was first described in 1889 by the French physician Francois Hallopeau. The condition is rare – statistics show it affects only 1% to 3% of the population, although new research suggests that the rate of hair pulling may be around 10% or higher. Read more…
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