Tajburrow

Seeing a child start losing his or her hair in large clumps can be a scary sight for any parent, especially if there seems to be no apparent reason for it. Without treatment, it could even lead to premature hair loss. The good news, however, is that most cases of children’s hair loss can be treated successfully as long as both the parent and child seek professional help early.

Other Reasons for Children’s Hair Loss
Surprisingly, the causes behind a child’s sudden hair loss, if not due to the three mentioned on the right, can actually be similar to the reasons behind an adult’s alopecia i.e. hair care, diet and stress.

Hair care
Children have more sensitive scalps than adults due to their thinner skin, so they respond more rapidly to chemical shampoos. Their epidermis is also thinner and under-keratinised. As a result, a child’s skin will absorb chemical agents more rapidly and thus have an adverse reaction causing hair loss.

Diet
A balanced diet is not only critical to a healthy system but also important for strong, vibrant hair. Permanent medication or a nutritionally deficient junk food diet can cause hair loss, both in children and adults.

Stress
Children undoubtedly live in a more stressful childhood now as compared to the past, with all the pressure from parents and teachers to excel in school. When a child is unable to meet the expectations set by parents, he or she will adopt different coping mechanisms, one of which could be pulling out hair or trichotillomania.

Three Main Reasons of Children’s Hair Loss

Tinea capitis
Commonly known as ringworm of the scalp, tinea capitis is actually a fungal infection that often appears as scaly patches of hair loss on the head. The hair strands are usually broken off at the surface of the skin and the affected area of your child’s scalp will have black dots. Tinea capitis is contagious, so care should be taken to ensure that your child does not share objects that touch his or her head such as towels, pillow cases and hair brushes. To treat the condition, it is recommended that you use a more gentle shampoo than the one that your child is currently using.

Alopecia areata
A disorder that can affect both children and adults (although it tends to affect children more), alopecia areata is characterised by obvious bald spots, usually on the scalp, and is thought to be caused by the body’s own immune system attacking the hair follicles. It can be psychologically damaging, especially for children, to cope with baldness. Alopecia areata can occur at any age but most cases first develop in children and teenagers. Alopecia areata is possibly caused by severe stress.

Trichotillomania
This condition is perhaps the most common cause of childhood hair loss and is a form of traction hair loss due to a child’s compulsion of consciously or unconsciously pulling out his or her own hair. The area of hair loss is usually on the side of the child’s dominant hand i.e. if the child is right-handed, the hair loss will appear on the right side of the child’s head.

Treatment
Parents can bring their children to seek professional help. TK Trichokare, the first ISO 9001 certified trichological centre in Singapore, offers customised scalp treatments devised from a broad array of natural plant extracts that are suitable for both adults and children. These European herbal ingredients such as Leopard’s Bane, Nettle and Rosemary have scalp cleaning and detoxifying properties that have been used for many centuries to optimise the health of the scalp.

Finance manager Annie Yap is one such customer who visited TK Trichokare to help treat her daughter’s hair loss. It began when Annie realised how greasy her daughter’s scalp was each time she came back home from school and how much hair her daughter was losing each day. She approached TK Trichokare with her concerns and the hair specialist assigned to her case meticulously went through her and her daughter’s needs before going through a detailed hair analysis. Following that, the specialist came up with a personalised treatment plan to deal with the scalp condition and today, Annie’s daughter has a healthy head of non-greasy hair.

Annie still regularly goes for scalp treatments with TK Trichokare, such is her unwavering faith. “I choose natural treatments because they are delicate and suitable for my child!”