What Your Hair and Scalp Can Tell You about Your Health

What Your Hair and Scalp Can Tell You about Your Health
Find out how a healthy hair and scalp is connected to your overall health and what signs you should look out for to determine the status of your health.

Hair can be worn, cut, and styled in so many ways to reflect or complement an individual’s unique personality. What most people might not know, however, is that hair hair and scalp can say a lot about one’s health. Hair is, like nails, an extension of our body that can give you clues regarding the condition of your body.

What Your Hair and Scalp Can Tell You about Your Health Image

Dry, Lifeless Hair

If you used to have thick, shiny, and voluminous hair that became dull and limp, then it is time for you to check what you have been doing over the past few weeks. Did you dye your hair more than once in the past six months? Have you been doing a lot of swimming in chlorinated pools? Many of these common activities like these can cause damage to your hair.

However, if you are not doing any activity that may cause your hair to lose its life and luster, then you can look into other reasons. For one, hair that is dry and lifeless can be a sign of hypothyroidism, a condition wherein the thyroid gland is not producing enough hormones and causes your metabolism to slow down. Along with dull and limp hair, other symptoms include sudden weight gain, feeling cold all the time, and unexplained fatigue. If you feel like you are experiencing more than of these symptoms, do not hesitate to visit a doctor for diagnosis.

Dandruff

Most people do not take dandruff seriously and usually treat it by using an anti-dandruff shampoo. However, if what seems like an ordinary case of dandruff becomes a more serious condition characterized by thick,scaly patches on your head, then it might be psoriasis, an autoimmune disease that causes the skin on your head to speed up the skin cell turnover, causing dry patches.

Hair Loss

On an average, a person loses around a hundred hair strands in a day, with some people shedding as much as 200-300 strands. While this kind of hair loss might be normal and to be expected from a person, there are certain times that an individual will see his or her hair is becoming thinner than usual or that hair strands come out in clumps. One reason behind hair thinning or hair loss is stress, or more specifically when a person has recently experienced a stressful event, such as death of a loved one, losing a job, or divorce.

There are also cases of hair loss due to hormonal imbalance that is connected to polycystic ovarian syndrome. Other possible causes include adverse reactions to some medications, such as antidepressants and oral contraceptives.

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