For how we live.
The whole scare traces to one 2009 study that measured a hormone, not hair. In 2025, the first trial to actually assess hair follicles found no difference between creatine and placebo.
A JAMA Dermatology review found the best-evidenced products — Viviscal, Nutrafol and a few others — but flagged weak studies and industry funding. For people who eat normally, the case is thin.
Creatine is not a testosterone booster — the trials show it leaves testosterone unchanged. The baldness scare traces to a single 20-man study that found a rise in DHT, a result no one has replicated in 15 years.
The trials that licensed minoxidil ran for 24 to 48 weeks, and a five-year follow-up shows why the honest answer to 'when can I stop' is: you probably can't without losing the gain.
A nine-man study found hair fibres thickened from 0.085 to 0.092 mm after 24 weeks of daily massage. The larger dataset was a self-reported survey — run by a hair-loss website.
The bestselling herbal for an enlarged prostate flopped in the trials: even at triple the usual dose it beat placebo by nothing. The hair-loss claim rests on a handful of small, weak studies rather than proof.
The reflex that stands body hair on end in the cold or at a stirring piece of music is largely a leftover from furrier ancestors — but new work shows the same wiring quietly keeps hair able to regrow.
The belief that a razor makes hair return coarser, faster or darker is one of medicine's durable myths. Controlled studies going back decades find no change in thickness, colour or growth rate.
Every documented case of biotin helping hair involved a deficiency. In people who are not deficient the evidence is absent — and high-dose supplements can skew blood tests, including a heart-attack marker.
A single randomised trial found rosemary oil and 2% minoxidil produced statistically indistinguishable hair counts at six months. It is the strongest evidence rosemary has — and it is thin.
A Nature study traced stress-driven greying in mice to sympathetic nerves that deplete pigment stem cells. Separate human work shows some grey hairs regain colour.
Young men are starting hair-loss drugs early and stacking them with dermarolling and oral minoxidil. Two drugs have decades of evidence; the trend's framing runs ahead of it.
Cochrane pooled 47 randomised trials in 5,290 women. The drug most often named alongside minoxidil as first-line — spironolactone — had no randomised evidence, and the review asked for some.
A network meta-analysis of 24 randomised trials ranks oral dutasteride first on 24-week hair density. The adverse-effect literature behind these drugs is separately, and seriously, contested.
Semaglutide showed a sixfold reporting signal for polycystic ovary syndrome and a smaller but real alopecia signal. Dulaglutide and tirzepatide showed lower or no signal for the same reproductive events.
Pooling 24 studies out of 133 screened, researchers found hair shedding tied to rapid weight loss more than to the drugs directly — and a pattern that hits women disproportionately.