PEORIA, Ill. – It’s not the most common medical condition, but it is garnering attention because of Sunday night’s Academy Awards telecast, where comedian Chris Rock got slapped by actor Will Smith, after Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife’s hair loss. And, it can be a very emotional thing for someone suffering from it.
Jada Pinkett-Smith has one of three forms of alopecia that, depending on the type, can cause either partial or total hair loss.
“It’s an autoimmune problem, where our immune system — for some reason, we don’t know exactly why — decides to attack the hair follicles,” said Dr. Mark Meeker, OSF HealthCare, based in Galesburg.
Meeker tells WMBD’s Craig Collins and Will Stevenson dermatologists are continuing to research the forms of alopecia — in part because the treatments for it, whether topical or steroid injections, don’t work very well.
“Our hair is very important to us,” said Meeker. “It’s part of who we are, it’s part of how we look. We spend a lot of time on our hair. We spend a lot of money on our hair. So, it’s very emotionally-charged. It’s very, very important to people. It’s normal to have a certain amount of hair loss,” but not in the way it happens with the three types of alopecia: one that causes a patch of hair to be lost, one that causes only a bald head, and one that can cause hair loss on the entire body.
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