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Messages - SarahVaughter

961
Dermarolling / Microneedling / Dermarolling for thinning hair
« on: May 26, 2012, 05:01:07 PM »
I think Ketoconazole will only help if the hair loss is accompanied by seborrheic dermatitis of the scalp.

Propecia contains a substance called finasteride. The main contributor to male pattern baldness is not testosterone but dihydrotestosterone. Hair follicles contains the enzyme 5α-reductase that converts testosterone to dihydrotestosteron. Finasteeride inhibits this enzyme and thus blocks the conversion. The studies on Finasteride have been generally successful, although not in 100% of cases. It slowed down the progression of baldness and triggered some regrowth. Finasteride causes in some men reversible changes in their libido and sexual function. As you can see in the third study, 3.8% men on Finasteride experienced these side effects comparing to 2.1% men on a placebo. If you decide to try it, look for Finasteride.

Finasteride in the treatment of men with androgenetic alopecia

Background:

Androgenetic alopecia (male pattern hair loss) is caused by androgen-dependent miniaturization of scalp hair follicles, with scalp dihydrotestosterone (DHT) implicated as a contributing cause. Finasteride, an inhibitor of type II 5α-reductase, decreases serum and scalp DHT by inhibiting conversion of testosterone to DHT. Objective: Our purpose was to determine whether finasteride treatment leads to clinical improvement in men with male pattern hair loss.

Methods:

In two 1-year trials, 1553 men (18 to 41 years of age) with male pattern hair loss received oral finasteride 1 mg/d or placebo, and 1215 men continued in blinded extension studies for a second year. Efficacy was evaluated by scalp hair counts, patient and investigator assessments, and review of photographs by an expert panel.

Results:

Finasteride treatment improved scalp hair by all evaluation techniques at 1 and 2 years (P < .001 vs placebo, all comparisons). Clinically significant increases in hair count (baseline = 876 hairs), measured in a 1-inch diameter circular area (5.1 cm2 ) of balding vertex scalp, were observed with finasteride treatment (107 and 138 hairs vs placebo at 1 and 2 years, respectively; P < .001). Treatment with placebo resulted in progressive hair loss. Patients’ self-assessment demonstrated that finasteride treatment slowed hair loss, increased hair growth, and improved appearance of hair. These improvements were corroborated by investigator assessments and assessments of photographs. Adverse effects were minimal.

Conclusion:

In men with male pattern hair loss, finasteride 1 mg/d slowed the progression of hair loss and increased hair growth in clinical trials over 2 years. (J Am Acad Dermatol 1998;39:578-89.)

Clinical dose ranging studies with finasteride, a type 2 5α-reductase inhibitor, in men with male pattern hair loss * *

Background:


Androgenetic alopecia is a common condition of adult men. Finasteride, a type 2 5α-reductase inhibitor, decreases the formation of dihydrotestosterone from testosterone.

Objective:

Two separate clinical studies were conducted to establish the optimal dose of finasteride in men with this condition.

Methods:

Men from 18 to 36 years of age with moderate vertex male pattern hair loss received finasteride 5, 1, 0.2, or 0.01 mg/day or placebo based on random assignment. Efficacy was determined by scalp hair counts, patient self-assessment, investigator assessment, and assessment of clinical photographs. Safety was assessed by clinical and laboratory measurements and by analysis of adverse experiences.

Results:

Efficacy was demonstrated for all end points for finasteride at doses of 0.2 mg/day or higher, with 1 and 5 mg demonstrating similar efficacy that was superior to lower doses. Efficacy of the 0.01 mg dose was similar to placebo. No significant safety issues were identified in the trials.

Conclusion:

Finasteride 1 mg/day is the optimal dose for the treatment of men with male pattern hair loss and was subsequently identified for further clinical development.

(The reported clinical studies were entirely supported by Merck Research Laboratories, Merck & Co, Inc. Merck & Co, Inc is the company that manufactures and markets finasteride.)



Finasteride: A Review of its Use in Male Pattern Hair Loss


The 5 -reductase inhibitor finasteride blocks the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT), the androgen responsible for male pattern hair loss (androgenetic alopecia) in genetically predisposed men.

Results of phase III clinical studies in 1879 men have shown that oral finasteride 1 mg/day promotes hair growth and prevents further hair loss in a significant proportion of men with male pattern hair loss. Evidence suggests that the improvement in hair count reported after 1 year is maintained during 2 years' treatment. In men with vertex hair loss, global photographs showed improvement in hair growth in 48% of finasteride recipients at 1 year and in 66% at 2 years compared with 7% of placebo recipients at each time point. Furthermore, hair counts in these men showed that 83% of finasteride versus 28% of placebo recipients had no further hair loss compared with baseline after 2 years.

The clinical efficacy of oral finasteride has not yet been compared with that of topical minoxidil, the only other drug used clinically in patients with male pattern hair loss.

Therapeutic dosages of finasteride are generally well tolerated. In phase III studies, 7.7% of patients receiving finasteride 1 mg/day compared with 7.0% of those receiving placebo reported treatment-related adverse events. The overall incidence of sexual function disorders, comprising decreased libido, ejaculation disorder and erectile dysfunction, was significantly greater in finasteride than placebo recipients (3.8 vs 2.1%). All sexual adverse events were reversed on discontinuation of therapy and many resolved in patients who continued therapy. No other drug-related events were reported with an incidence  1% in patients receiving finasteride. Most events were of mild to moderate severity.

Oral finasteride is contraindicated in pregnant women because of the risk of hypospadias in male fetuses.

Conclusions:

Oral finasteride promotes scalp hair growth and prevents further hair loss in a significant proportion of men with male pattern hair loss. With its generally good tolerability profile, finasteride is a new approach to the management of this condition, for which treatment options are few. Its role relative to topical minoxidil has yet to be determined.

962
Dermarolling / Microneedling / Sarah, Dermastamp Advice Please?
« on: May 26, 2012, 04:12:24 PM »
We do not sell a 0.5 mm dermastamp at the moment. The main purpose of a dermastamp is to treat scars and for that, long needles are always needed.Nevertheless, you do not have to insert the full length of the needles into the skin when you use a 1.5 mm dermastamp. It depends on you how deeply you insert it.

 We will soon sell shorter-needled dermastamps.

     

 We also get many requests for a large dermastamp with more than 35 needles. Unfortunately, there is a problem with the so called "fakir effect": The more needles a microneedling tool has, the more difficult it is to penetrate the skin. The skin is a very tough surface to penetrate. Inserting one needle is easy, inserting 35 needles simultaneously is much harder and inserting 100 needles in one go will be very hard, and difficult to achieve deep penetration.

964
I understand your concern, but it is unwarranted. Even after you thoroughly wash your skin with soap and apply alcohol, there are orders of magnitudes more bacteria on your skin than on a roller that comes from the factory.

It is theoretically possible that a factory worker has a dangerous infection and handles the roller and for some reason the factory sterilization process malfunctions and the bacteria sporulate.

Then, if you would have a serious immune deficiency, you could theoretically, I suppose, end up with an infection. However, this has never happened to anyone in the history of dermaneedling, to my knowledge (and I read everything published in that regard - all the time).

The roller, once disinfected and not used, is shielded from the environment by several layers of packaging. It is not realistic to fear that there are harmful bacteria such as Anthrax floating around in your environmental air, and even if they were, you'd be breating them in and that would be the same, or worse, as rolling them into your top layer of skin.

So no, I would not worry at all about the sterileness of unused rollers.

If you still have doubts, then simply sterilize them before first use, as per our instructions.

965
Sepsis is the wrong word, sepsis means blood poisoning. That is impossible with dermaneedling. Skin infection however is always possible with longer needles, however it is exceedingly rare. None of our customers has ever reported it, and we have tens of thousands of customers (we are perhaps the largest dermaroller retailer in the world).

The main cause of it is forgetting to clean the dermaroller after dermarolling. If you allow to sit it for weeks without cleaning and sterilizing first, you'll end up with a festering mess of bacteria.

The immune system can handle the bacteria on your skin very well. It knows them and has antibodies to it. Very superficial infections of such "own body" bacteria are no problem whatsoever for a healthy immune system. That is why it is much more important to clean and sterilize your needling instrument immediately after use, than the "sterlize" the skin. Skin can't really be sterilized anyway, only disinfected, the bacterial load can be reduced. Proper skin disinfection as surgeons practice it involves long scrubbing with soap, multiple rinses, more soap and subsequent use of a disinfecting agent. However, such rigorous disinfection is not really required.

Surgeons know that when you remove the top oil layer from the skin, the sebaceous glands that were "capped" are now exposed and they contain bacteria. So a light wash with soap makes things worse, in terms of bacterial load. But surgeons disinfect to protect people with no immune function from foreign bacteria entering their organs, and that requires wholly different standards of disinfection.

966
Impressive improvement, can we use these pictures as promotional material in the "before and after photos" section and put a "Vaughter Wellness" logo on it so that our lazy competitors won't claim it's all their merit?



                      Attached files

967
Dermarolling / Microneedling / Scar Types
« on: May 24, 2012, 04:14:00 PM »
Unfortunately, three is no single successful approach that always works for everyone so trying different approaches and improvising a little is often necessary. When you needle/stamp, you should also do the edges of the scar.

 

  Boxcar- and especially icepick scars are supposedly not tethered, however I would not rely on it and try the suction method at least on the boxcars. I think that both theories are correct. The scars are lined with scar tissue and at the same time there is normal healthy tissue missing.

968
They come Gamma-sterilized.

BTW Disinfecting the dermaneedling instrument after dermarolling is more important than disinfecting the skin before dermarolling. The most important part of the disinfection is to clean the dermarolling instrument after dermarolling with dishwashing detergent and warm water and rinse it under a very strong stream of water to remove blood and skin debris from the needles. Then soak it in Chloramine-T or Ethanol.

969
Dermarolling / Microneedling / seborrheic dermatitis
« on: May 23, 2012, 06:51:56 PM »
What I meant to say is that Seborrhea tends to re-appear no matter when it first came. Very few Seborrhea sufferers had only one incidence of Seborrhea without it ever coming back. I hope you will be lucky though!

970
Dermarolling / Microneedling / slip clothes and uv rays
« on: May 23, 2012, 10:53:58 AM »
Definitely yes.

971
Dermarolling / Microneedling / slip clothes and uv rays
« on: May 22, 2012, 11:37:30 AM »
Just make sure you do not expose freshly dermarolled skin to severe sun, especially if you have just rolled with long needles.

Use your own judgment and common sense. If you live in Australia or the North of Sweden, the UV is very strong in summer and will go straight through a thin white T-shirt.

But you will notice this. Just adequately protect freshly rolled skin against bright sunshine.

972
Dermarolling / Microneedling / slip clothes and uv rays
« on: May 22, 2012, 06:20:20 AM »
If the fabric is thin (T-shirts etc. are thin), it will not protect fully, only partially.

973
Dermarolling / Microneedling / seborrheic dermatitis
« on: May 21, 2012, 06:23:39 PM »
That is fantastic!

I would not have expected that. You may have to do some maintenance because Seborrhea is hardly ever completely cured, it is just brought under control and it goes up and down.

975
Dermarolling / Microneedling / Chloramine T question
« on: May 21, 2012, 05:46:36 AM »
Yes you can still use it.

How it works in nearly all cases, with chemicals and temperature, is that the higher the temperature, the faster the molecules move and the greater the likelihood that they will change (connect with other molecules or split up into constituent molecules/atoms).

So basically the cooler, the better, in terms of chemical stability.