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Do you have any advice for dealing with postpartum hair loss that is also breastfeeding-safe?
—Jess
Postpartum hair loss is common. It is not completely understood why it occurs, but we have some mechanistic sense. Each of your hairs is in one of two phases: a growth phase (anagen), which is the phase most of your hair is in, and a resting phase (telogen), which occurs for one to three months before the hair falls out. At any given time, about 85% of your hair is in the growth phase. Normally (outside of pregnancy and postpartum), you lose the telogen hairs gradually at a steady pace.
In pregnancy and early postpartum, for some people, more of the telogen hairs are retained. So you have some extra, basically dead, hair. It eventually gets forced out when new hair needs to grow in that follicle. But it’s a lot more hair at once because you were holding on to more of it.
Hair shedding typically starts two to five months after birth and lasts three to six months. It can result in an appearance of thinning hair, a receding hairline, and, of course, hair in the shower. The hair does grow back, typically in another six to nine months.
Can you do anything about this? No, or at least there is nothing in the data that has been shown to be effective for postpartum hair loss specifically. There are products that claim to address this — like Nutrafol — but there isn’t good clinical trial data backing this up.
It’s a challenging type of thing to study. Researchers are cautious about doing anything with people who are breastfeeding, and since the problem gets better over time, you really need a good control group. This paper mentions iron supplementation as a possible treatment; many breastfeeding women are anemic anyway, so that probably wouldn’t hurt.
At the end of the day, the only real treatment is waiting. Maybe find a cool hat in the meantime.
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My biggest issue with the hair loss was that my very long hair would be so tangled and take so long to brush out but I didn’t have time to do that if the baby just woke up during my brief shower! I started brushing my hair pre and post shower to get more loose hair out before it was wet and harder to detangle.