Does PRP Work For Hair Loss?
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Dr. Ankit Gupta takes us through the details of this hair loss remedy for androgenic alopecia.
The bald truth
Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) is a controversial treatment for androgenic hair loss.
What it involves: blood is drawn and separated using a centrifuge. PRP—including growth proteins and hormones—is extracted from the blood; about 30 ml of blood is needed to produce 5 ml of PRP. This is then injected directly into the scalp. As this can be painful, local anaesthetic is sometimes used first. This usually involves monthly sessions for the first 3 months, then booster sessions every 3–6 months thereafter.
Does it work? Research is young; so far 60% of trials have found it worked; 40% found it didn’t. When it works, effectiveness (in terms of hair restoration) is considered to be between 25–43%. Results are inconsistent and seem to vary from person to person.
In short, this doctor’s recommendation is to consider it after already having tried standard treatments such as finasteride and/or minoxidil, as they are more likely to work and don’t involve such exciting procedures as injecting your own blood extracts back into your head.
For more on all of this, plus links to the 13 papers cited, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Hair-Loss Remedies, By Science
- Hair Growth: Caffeine and Minoxidil Strategies
- Gentler Hair Health Options
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Recommended
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
“Skinny Fat” Explained (& How To Fix It)
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
“Skinny fat” is a term you may have seen floating around social media. It describes people who have a low body weight but a high body fat percentage, often resulting in flabby appearance despite being within a weight range considered healthy. Many try dieting and exercising, only to find that neither work.
This video explains what’s going wrong, and how to fix it:
Diet & exercise won’t work if it’s not right
This problem occurs because common weight-loss approaches, such as restrictive dieting and excessive cardio, fail to improve body composition:
- Restrictive dieting reduces both fat and lean mass, keeping the body fat percentage unchanged
- Cardio burns some calories but the underlying metabolic issue hasn’t meaningfully changed, so any loss will be temporary (and most of any immediate loss will be water weight, anyway)
The key to overcoming skinny fat is resistance training. Lifting weights or doing bodyweight exercises helps build muscle, which not only lowers body fat percentage (by simple mathematics; add more muscle and the percentages of other things must go down even if the total amount is the same) and improves overall definition, which is something most people consider nice. However, the real value here is that it actually addresses the underlying metabolic issue—because muscle costs calories to maintain, one’s basal metabolic rate will now be faster, even when you’re sleeping.
This then becomes… Not quite a self-sustaining system, because you do have to still eat well and continue to do resistance training, but your body will be doing most of the work for you, and you’ll find it’s a lot easier to maintain a healthy body composition than to get one in the first place, for exactly the metabolic reason we described.
For more on all of this, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Visceral Belly Fat & How To Lose It ← this is a different, but adjacent issue (and very important for avoiding metabolic disease risks)
Take care!
Share This Post
-
The Beautiful Cure – by Dr. Daniel Davis
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
This one is not just a book about the history of immunology and a primer on how the immune system works. It is those things too, but it’s more:
Dr. Daniel Davis, a professor of immunology and celebrated researcher in his own right, bids us look at not just what we can do, but also what else we might.
This is not to say that the book is speculative; Dr. Davis deals in data rather than imaginings. He also cautions us against falling prey to sensationalization of the “beautiful cures” that the field of immunology is working towards. What, then, are these “beautiful cures”?
Just like our immune systems (in the plural; by Dr. Davis’ count, primarily talking about our innate and adaptive immune systems) can in principle deal with any biological threat, but in practice don’t always get it right, the same goes for our medicine.
He argues that in principle, we categorically can cure any immune-related disease (including autoimmune diseases, and tangentially, cancer). The theoretical existence of such cures is a mathematically known truth. The practical, contingent existence of them? That’s what takes the actual work.
The style of the book is accessible pop science, with a hard science backbone from start to finish.
Bottom line: if you’d like to know more about immunology, and be inspired with hope and wonder without getting carried away, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out The Beautiful Cure, and learn about these medical marvels!
Share This Post
-
Nutrivore – by Dr. Sarah Ballantyne
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
The core idea of this book is that foods can be assigned a numerical value according to their total nutritional value, and that this number can be used to guide a person’s diet such that we will eat, in aggregate, a diet that is more nutritious. So far, so simple.
What Dr. Ballantyne also does, besides explaining and illustrating this system (there are chapters explaining the calculation system, and appendices with values), is also going over what to consider important and what we can let slide, and what things we might need more of to address a wide assortment of potential health concerns. And yes, this is definitely a “positive diet” approach, i.e. it focuses on what to add in, not what to cut out.
The premise of the “positive diet” approach is simple, by the way: if we get a full set of good nutrients, we will be satisfied and not crave unhealthy food.
She also offers a lot of helpful “rules of thumb”, and provides a variety of cheat-sheets and suchlike to make things as easy as possible.
There’s also a recipes section! Though, it’s not huge and it’s probably not necessary, but it’s just one more “she’s thinking of everything” element.
Bottom line: if you’d like a single-volume “Bible of” nutrition-made-easy, this is a very usable tome.
Click here to check out Nutrivore, and start filling up your diet!
Share This Post
Related Posts
-
How to Stay Sane – by Philippa Perry
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
First, what this book is not: a guide of “how to stay sane” in the popular use of the word “sane”, meaning free from serious mental illness of all and any kinds in general, and especially free from psychotic delusions. Alas, this book will not help with those.
What, then, is it? A guide of “how to stay sane” in the more casual sense of resiliently and adaptively managing stress, anxiety, and suchlike. The “light end” of mental health struggles, that nonetheless may not always feel light when dealing with them.
The author, a psychotherapist, draws from her professional experience and training to lay out psychological tools for our use, as well as giving the reader a broader understanding of the most common ills that may ail us.
The writing style is relaxed and personable; it’s not at all like reading a textbook.
The psychotherapeutic style is not tied to one model, and rather hops from one to another, per what is most likely to help for a given thing. This is, in this reviewer’s opinion at least, far better than the (all-too common) attempt made by a lot of writers to try to present their personal favorite model as the cure for all ills, instead of embracing the whole toolbox as this one does.
Bottom line: if your mental health is anywhere between “mostly good” and “a little frayed around the edges but hanging on by at least a few threads”, then this book likely can help you gain/maintain the surer foundation you’re surely seeking.
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Savory Protein Crêpe
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
Pancakes have a bad reputation healthwise, but they don’t have to be so. Here’s a very healthy crêpe recipe, with around 20g of protein per serving (which is about how much protein most people’s body’s can use at one sitting) and a healthy dose of fiber too:
You will need
Per crêpe:
- ½ cup milk (your preference what kind; we recommend oat milk for this)
- 2 oz chickpea flour (also called garbanzo bean flour, or gram flour)
- 1 tsp nutritional yeast
- 1 tsp ras el-hanout (optional but tasty and contains an array of beneficial phytochemicals)
- 1 tsp dried mixed herbs
- ⅛ tsp MSG or ¼ tsp low-sodium salt
For the filling (also per crêpe):
- 6 cherry tomatoes, halved
- Small handful baby spinach
- Extra virgin olive oil
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Mix the dry crêpe ingredients in a bowl, and then stir in the milk, whisking to mix thoroughly. Leave to stand for at least 5 minutes.
2) Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a skillet, add the tomatoes and fry for 1 minute, before adding the spinach, stirring, and turning off the heat. As soon as the spinach begins to wilt, set it aside.
3) Heat a little olive oil either in the same skillet (having been carefully wiped clean) or a crêpe pan if you have one, and pour in a little of the batter you made, tipping the pan so that it coats the pan evenly and thinly. Once the top is set, jiggle the pan to see that it’s not stuck, and then flip your crêpe to finish on the other side.
If you’re not confident of your pancake-tossing skills, or your pan isn’t good enough quality to permit this, you can slide it out onto a heatproof chopping board, and use that to carefully turn it back into the pan to finish the other side.
4) Add the filling to one half of the crêpe, and fold it over, pushing down at the edges with a spatula to make a seal, cooking for another 30 seconds or so. Alternatively, you can just serve a stack of crêpes and add the filling at the table, folding or rolling per personal preference:
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Level-Up Your Fiber Intake! (Without Difficulty Or Discomfort)
- Three Daily Servings of Beans?
- Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More
- Our Top 5 Spices: How Much Is Enough For Benefits?
- Sea Salt vs MSG – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
-
Heart Rate Zones, Oxalates, & More
10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.
It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝I think the heart may be an issue for lots of us. I know it is for me due to AFib. When I’m in my training zone like on a treadmill, I’m usually around 110 to 120. But there are occasionally times when I’m at 140 or 150. How dangerous is that? If I use that formula of 180 minus age, thats 103. I get nothing from that. My resting heart rate is in the 50 to 60 range.❞
First, for safety, let us draw attention to our medical disclaimer at the bottom of each email, and also specifically note that we are not cardiologists here, let alone your cardiologist. There’s a lot we can’t know or advise about. However, as general rules of thumb:
For people without serious health conditions, it is considered good and healthful for one’s heart rate to double (from its resting rate) during exercise, with even more than 2.5x resting rate being nothing more than a good cardio workout.
As for “180 minus age” (presuming you mean: to calculate the safe maximum heart rate), more common (and used by the American Heart Association) is 220 minus age. In your case, that’d give 143.
Having atrial fibrillation may change this however, and we can’t offer medical advice.
We can point to this AHA “AFib Resources For Patients and Professionals”, including this handy FAQ sheet which says:
“Am I able to exercise?” / “Yes, as long as you’re cleared by your doctor, you can perform normal activities of daily living that you can tolerate” (accompanied by a little graphic of a person using an exercise bike)
You personally probably know this already, of course, but it’s quite an extensive collection of resources, so we thought we’d include it.
It’s certainly a good idea for everyone to be aware of their healthy heart rate ranges, regardless of having a known heart condition or not, though!
American Heart Association: Target Heart Rates Chart
❝I would like to see some articles on osteoporosis❞
You might enjoy this mythbusting main feature we did a few weeks ago!
The Bare-Bones Truth About Osteoporosis
❝Interesting, but… Did you know spinach is high in oxylates? Some people are sensitive and can cause increased inflammation, joint pain or even kidney stones. Moderation is key. My sister and I like to eat healthy but found out by experience that too much spinach salad caused us joint and other aches.❞
It’s certainly good to be mindful of such things! For most people, a daily serving of spinach shouldn’t cause ill effects, and certainly there are other greens to eat.
We wondered whether there was a way to reduce the oxalate content, and we found:
How to Reduce Oxalic Acid in Spinach: Neutralizing Oxalates
…which led us this product on Amazon:
Nephure Oxalate Reducing Enzyme, Low Oxalate Diet Support
We wondered what “nephure” was, and whether it could be trusted, and came across this “Supplement Police” article about it:
Nephure Review – Oxalate Reducing Enzyme Powder Health Benefits?
…which honestly, seems to have been written as a paid advertisement. But! It did reference a study, which we were able to look up, and find:
In vitro and in vivo safety evaluation of Nephure™
…which seems to indicate that it was safe (for rats) in all the ways that they checked. They did not, however, check whether it actually reduced oxalate content in spinach or any other food.
The authors did declare a conflict of interest, in that they had a financial relationship with the sponsor of the study, Captozyme Inc.
All in all, it may be better to just have kale instead of spinach:
- 20 Foods High in Oxalates to Limit if You Have Kidney Stones
- The Kidney Dietician: The Best Low Oxalate Greens
We turn the tables and ask you a question!
We’ll then talk about this tomorrow:
Don’t Forget…
Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!
Learn to Age Gracefully
Join the 98k+ American women taking control of their health & aging with our 100% free (and fun!) daily emails:
