his week, I'm excited to welcome Rob English to the podcast. Rob is a researcher, medical editor, and the founder of Perfect Hair Health, a website dedicated to showcasing evidence-based methods for hair regrowth with or without drugs. Rob's interest in hair loss began in 2007, right after he was diagnosed with androgenic alopecia. Since then, he spent thousands of hours researching hair loss – its causes, treatments, and misconceptions. He has distilled complex hair loss science into dozens of reader-friendly articles. He also published four peer-reviewed papers on androgenic alopecia: one on its pathology, one on an experimental therapy, one on methodological challenges faced while conducting biopsy research, and one systematic review.
Question about the episode
- What factors cause hair loss?
- Are natural therapies worth exploring?
- What are the most common myths associated with healthy hair?
https://180nutrition.com.au/
Stu
This week, I'm excited to welcome Rob English to the podcast. Rob is a researcher, medical editor, and the founder of Perfect Hair Health, a website dedicated to showcasing evidence-based methods for hair regrowth with or without drugs. [00:01:00] Rob's interest in hair loss began in 2007 right after he was diagnosed with androgenetic alopecia. Since then he's spent thousands of hours researching hair loss, its causes, treatments, and misconceptions. In this episode, we discuss the fundamental causes of hair loss, the common misconceptions, and the most effective treatment options. Over to Rob.
Stu
Hey guys, this is Stu from 180 Nutrition and I am delighted to welcome Rob English to the podcast. Rob, how are you mate?
Rob
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
Stu
No. Well, look, thank you so much for agreeing to come on and having a chat. I know that we've got lots questions that people will be very, very intrigued to hear your take on, but first up, for all of our listeners that may not be familiar with you or your work, I'd love it if you could just tell us a little bit about yourself, please.
Rob
Sure. So I'm Rob English. I am a medical editor and I'm [00:02:00] a peer-reviewed researcher who specializes in hair loss disorders. So that can be anything from common hair loss disorders like androgenetic alopecia and telogen effluvium all the way toward less common hair loss types like alopecia areata, autoimmune forms of hair loss, scarring alopecias. And I'm also the founder of a website called Perfect Hair Health, which showcases evidence-based approaches for hair regrowth with the drug model, without the drug model. It doesn't really matter which path somebody takes. For me what matters [00:02:30] is their access to good information that they're not making any decisions that are rooted in their exposure to, I guess what I would describe asymmetrical information or cognitive dissonance.
And I'm also on the editorial board of a journal called Dermatology and Therapy. So that gives me insights into the peer review process. I could see what's coming down the pipeline in terms of different hair loss research, which interventional approaches are gaining more traction, and it also gives me this opportunity to converse with a bunch of different people in the hair loss community that are active researchers and have dedicated their careers to these things.
So it's a really fun experience overall. I guess what makes me a little unique compared to other people is that I'm on the editorial board of a dermatology journal. I have all of these peer-reviewed publications and I am not a technically trained academic. I didn't study anything related to hair loss in college. My interest in hair loss research, which later became my career, happened after college. [00:03:30]
And it all happened because of self-interest because back when I was 16 years old, I started to notice that my hair was thinning a little bit. 17 years old, went to a doctor who specializes in hair loss disorders. It was a transplant surgeon. They did this scalp exam on me and they told me that I was dealing with male-pattern hair loss and androgenetic alopecia. And that it's this chronic and progressive hair loss disorder and that if you don't seek treatment for it, it just gets worse and that I'd likely be bald by 30, 35 years old [00:04:00] unless I did something about it. So obviously that was a warning signal that I probably need to focus a little bit more on my hair than other people because I was the only one at the time that I knew of even dealing with hair loss at such a young age. So it also kind of felt, I guess, emotionally isolating. So I got a prescription for this drug called finasteride. I was told to start using minoxidil twice daily. I opted into a clinical trial inside a clinic for low level laser therapy,
[00:04:30] which was super expensive at the time, but I was freaking out and wanted to do something. And then I went home and like most people who are facing a very similar situation, I started to Google some of the things that I was trying and some of the drugs that I wanted to use and I ran into a bunch of bad information and misinformation about this heightened side effect risk of these drugs, which scared me away from trying things like finasteride and then led me down [00:05:00] this path where I was really desperate to find solutions outside of the drug model, or at least outside of hormonally modifying models that targeted hormones like DHT. So that was really the basis of what got me into trialing different products, topicals, supplements, devices, treatments. And with each failure point, I became more and more interested in hair loss research until eventually when I went to college, I had access to all these medical journals, I could
[00:05:30] actually use the university library system to read full papers rather than just titles and abstracts, and that's really where my interest in hair loss research kind of exploded. So I felt like I kind of became this closet nerd for anything related to hair loss disorders. And when I finally saw some success outside of the drug model, I started a website, Perfect Hair Health, to talk about some of those models and the evidence supporting them and some of the hypotheses. And then a few years later, I decided to start publishing papers about them.
[00:06:00] So the first paper was about a hypothetical pathogenesis model, which discussed some potentially underutilized treatment targets or interventional targets for androgenetic alopecia. The second paper was related to a potential intervention. The third paper was related to conflicting histological reports across investigation groups with the relationship between scarring and inflammation and prostaglandin activity of androgenetic alopecia patients. The fourth has been a literature review and we have a fifth and peer review right [00:06:30] now that is focused on microneedling and it's use in hair loss disorder. So wound healing. And that's a big interest of mine.
And so that's kind of what I do and how I fell into this type of work and what I do in a day to day. I manage a very small research team right now dedicated toward pumping out different manuscripts related to hypotheses, letter to editors, literature reviews, and I get to engage on a regular basis with hair loss investigation groups. So it's a lot of fun for me and I like talking about it.
For full transcript and interview: https://180nutrition.com.au/180-tv/rob-english-interview/
