Defining Different Types of Hair Loss

How do you define hair loss? Do you consider you’re balding when
you’ve lost 5 hairs, 5,000, or 50,000? Can you slow the balding
process, stop it altogether, or should you just increase your base-
ball hat collection and live with it?
Hair falls out of your head every single day, at a rate of about 100
to 150 hairs if you are a Caucasian (Asians lose 80–120 per day and
Africans 60–100 per day). You aren’t going bald if your hair is
coming out at these rates because that is the rate that new hair
grows up from the scalp. If the hair that falls out isn’t replaced by
the same number of new hairs, then you have a balding problem.
Hair loss isn’t noticeable in the average person until more than 50
percent is lost, which is around 50,000 hairs, more or less.
Why does hair loss occur at all? You were born with your hair, and
by simple logic, you should die with it, right? Not one organ in the
human body dies as a natural course of aging, yet hair follicles
commit mass suicide over time. Other human organs may change
over time and become less functional, but they don’t disappear
altogether. Is hair loss a type of genetic adaptation? No one knows.
This section looks at the different types and causes of hair loss,
including the cause of 99 percent of all cases of male balding: male
pattern baldness.