Preventing Hair Loss Before It Starts: The New Science of Hair Health & Healthy Aging with Dr. Doris Day, MD
about the episode
Hair loss affects millions of people, yet most conversations begin only after thinning becomes visible. In this episode of Innovate & Elevate, Sharon Kedar sits down with board-certified dermatologist and hair health expert Dr. Doris Day to explore why the future of hair health may depend on earlier intervention, better understanding, and new scientific breakthroughs. Together, they discuss the biology of hair loss, the role of scalp health, inflammation, hormones, and genetics, and the innovations that could transform how we prevent and treat hair loss in the years ahead. From today's most effective therapies to emerging technologies currently in development, this conversation offers a fascinating look at one of the fastest-evolving areas of healthy aging and human health innovation.
This Episode Is For You If:
- You’re interested in the latest science of healthy aging, including how hormones, inflammation, scalp health, and nutrition influence hair growth.
- You want to learn about emerging innovations, treatments, and technologies that could change the future of hair loss prevention and hair health.
- You’ve noticed hair thinning, increased shedding, or changes in your hair and want to understand what may be driving it.
Jessica Federer
About Dr. Doris Day, MD
Dr. Doris Day, MD, is a board-certified dermatologist, Clinical Professor of Dermatology at NYU Langone Health, and founder of Day Dermatology and Aesthetics in New York City. A nationally recognized expert in skin, hair, scalp health, and healthy aging, she has been named one of Newsweek's Top Cosmetic Dermatologists in the United States and a Castle Connolly Top Doctor for more than 20 consecutive years. Dr. Day is also a bestselling author, educator, researcher, and Co-Founder of Rapalogix Health, where she helps advance innovative approaches to skin longevity and regenerative health.
Episode Outline
(00:00) Why Hair Loss Matters So Much
(02:15) Scarring vs. Non-Scarring Hair Loss
(04:44) The Importance of Early Intervention
(07:57) Understanding Hair Growth Cycles
(09:23) Stress, Hormones & Hair Shedding
(11:18) Female Pattern Hair Loss Explained
(12:26) Minoxidil, Supplements & Treatment Options
(14:09) Lasers, PRP & Emerging Therapies
(16:25) Why Scalp Health Matters
(20:10) Protecting Hair Before It's Gone
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Sharon Kedar CFA: Please welcome Dr. Doris Day, a board certified dermatologist, author and expert in skin, hair and scalp health. Through her clinical work, research and patient education, she has helped bring greater attention to the science of aging dermatology and the growing conversation around women's hair health. Dr. Doris Day, welcome to the Innovate and Elevate podcast.
Dr. Doris Day: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be on with you.
Sharon Kedar: Can we talk about midlife and hair health? Can you just unpack the science of what women should expect? I kind of think we need to do a little PSA of what happens in life.
Dr. Doris Day: It's really important to start by understanding that it's hardwired into our DNA to care about hair. Hair is not a vital organ. We can live without any hair and live just productive, long lives. But when women come in and they perceive they're losing hair, people become nearly suicidal at times. It's a really important object of beauty, and it's a sign of fertility and health.
I mean, just think about it. If you see an animal and it has a thick fur coat, you think, "Wow, that's an animal that's fertile, it's young, it's healthy." It's a quick cue to overall health and fertility. So as we lose our hair, it's a sign to us and to anybody looking at us that there's something wrong. And when we think about it, even my patients who get chemotherapy don't care as much about the cancer or the chemo as they do about losing hair. And they're willing to do something that might minimize their potential for survival if it's a chemotherapy that will make them lose less hair or not lose hair at all.
So if you are losing hair, just know that it's normal to care about it. And because it has such a powerful cue to youth, health, fertility, vitality, we really do care.
Sharon Kedar: I find it so, so interesting how you talk about hair as identity, and how people are willing to go on different chemotherapy and otherwise, and that it's like a symbol of...
It sounds like it's a symbol of life. Like, not just vitality.
Part of this is science, but part of this episode, too, is just permission to explore.
Dr. Doris Day: It's a conversation to know, one, you're not alone.
There are a lot of people investing a lot of money in making it better, and here are the things you have control over that we can help with.
We can overcome that and say, "Okay, I'm losing hair. It's partly aging, partly genetic." It could be partly a GLP-1, partly a nutritional component, partly anemia.
There's so many medical things behind it. And when I look at hair loss, I always look at the first category is, is it scarring or non-scarring? Most of the time it's non-scarring. And what that means, it means that the follicle is present, but the hair follicle has become so miniaturized that we don't see it at all.
If it's scarring, that means the follicle is destroyed and the hair won't grow back.
Sharon Kedar: So a dermatologist can actually look, I'm assuming with a derm light. My twin's a derm, by the way.
I am not. So you look and you can physically tell?
Dr. Doris Day: The good thing is that everything about the skin is on the outside. We can tell a lot just by looking at the skin. I can tell a lot about hair loss, asthma, allergies, cancer. A whole bunch of things I can see through the skin just by looking at the skin with my eyes and a good light.
For women in perimenopause, the type of scarring hair loss that's really a problem is something called frontal fibrosing alopecia. That's a scarring hair loss that for some reason, we start to see around perimenopause and menopause, where along the frontal hairline you start to lose follicles, and the skin can look waxy, and it almost can even look like little plugs where you have, like, these strands of hair and hair missing around it.
And it can be really severe where it makes your hairline recede. And once the hair is gone, the hair is gone. But what I've learned from treating this is that, when you treat it, and generally we start with very dilute concentrations of cortisone injections, so Kenalog in a very, very, very low concentration.
We're not trying to thin the skin or destroy collagen. We're just trying to lower inflammation. Is that the hair that seems like it's scarred, the follicle that seems like it's scarred in the whole area, is not. So some follicles are overcome and they're gone. But in the neighborhood, the other follicles are just stunned.
They're not quite scarred yet. And we can recover more hair than we realize. So in those patients, I'll use topical minoxidil. I'll do the cortisone injections. Now there's some data with low dose naltrexone making a difference. There's a whole bunch of things we're trying to minimize the scarring. But the main thing is to get into the dermatologist early because those cortisone injections done monthly really can protect against the progression of it.
And it does seem like starting menopause hormone therapy early can mitigate some of that. One more reason to add in menopause hormone therapy that people don't think about. The more we talk about it, the more I see my patients come in early and tell me all these things that they're going through in their skin, and then I put it together for them and ask them, "How's your mood been?
How's your memory? How's your sleep? How's your joints? How's your weight? How are you feeling?" And then we put it together, and we go, "You're in perimenopause." They have no idea. These women are going to their OB-GYN. They're getting their checkups, and no one's putting it together, and they're suffering, and they're declining.
And we can protect against that. So as a dermatologist looking at hair, looking at skin, I'm often the one to help women understand that they're entering this new and potentially best phase of their life if we do it right.
Sharon Kedar: I'm thinking the hair conversation needs a massive pivot because what I'm hearing is that we can intervene a lot earlier. You've kind of blown my mind with that.
Dr. Doris Day: Yeah. It's such a big deal. It's a conversation I have with every single patient that comes into my office. I ask them are they doing hormone therapy. I ask them how they're feeling. And some women will say, "Well, I get my period every month." But that's not enough because you're still fertile when you go through perimenopause.
You can still be getting your period every month, but the quality changes. There's all these subtleties. The thing is that I'm a medical doctor.
I am treating patients in a holistic way. I have to know what's going on inside to help what's going on on the outside. I always tell my patients, "I have to keep you healthy so I can keep you beautiful."
Sharon Kedar: That is, I think, part of your brilliance, this idea that we're not a sum of our parts, that we're a whole human.
Dr. Doris Day: Yeah. My dad always taught me the best line. He was an anesthesiologist, which makes him a jack-of-all-trades, as anesthesiologists often are. And he always said, "We should all die young at an old age." And I added, "And we should look beautiful doing it." And he would agree 'cause he was vain in all the best ways.
But hair is a big component of that, and it's a driver into my office, which helps me help them understand all the things they can do. We talk about protein intake, resistance training, nutrition, hair care, processing of hair 'cause your hair's now also going gray, so we're doing all these things to our hair.
They often go lighter, so they're doing a lot of bleaching and dyeing and blonding of their hair, which can cause it to break, so I need to understand what they're doing to their hair, what's going on at the scalp level, keep the scalp healthy. And then one of my biggest jobs is to keep giving them hope because I do a lot of consulting for a lot of companies that are working on hair loss, and I tell you, I am so excited about new products, new drugs that are coming specifically for hair that have great efficacy, great safety data, that are going through the FDA approval process.
And I believe that within the next three to five years at the longest, we're going to have outstanding solutions for hair loss for women and for men.
Sharon Kedar: Wow. Okay, so we need to unpack that. To get back to something you said earlier, women come into your office, you talked about scarring versus non-scarring. How much of it is scarring versus how much of it is non-scarring?
Dr. Doris Day: Fortunately, the majority of it is non-scarring. I would say maybe 10% is scarring, maybe even less. But those are the ones I worry about the most. The non-scarring falls into several patterns. Telogen effluvium, which is a stress shedding. So telogen is a cycle of hair. It's the resting phase, right? Your hair grows for two to 10 years, that's the anagen phase. That's the growing phase. So that's how long your hair could get if you never cut it. So just think, if you never cut your hair over 10 years, some people it'll grow to the floor because they have a 10-year-long growing cycle. I don't think I have that. I'll never know 'cause I cut my hair, but that's how long it is.
So that's genetically determined how long your growing phase is. On the brows, it's weeks. On the lashes, it's weeks. But on the head, it's two to 10 years. So that's the growing phase. 90% of your hair should be in that growing phase. The resting and transitional phase is three to four months.
10% should be in the resting or transitional phase where it falls out, it rests a few months, it falls out, and then it grows back.
So normally, you go through a stress, like you get married, divorced, have a death in the family, a treatment, something happens in your life, and you have this major physiologic stress, and then three months later, you get that shed. Then the hair starts transitioning back to that random growing phase where 90% is in that growing phase again, and the hair will come back.
That can be a six to nine month to a year-long process. Like, we see this after childbirth.
But what happens is if you go through a chronic stress, so if you're going through perimenopause and your hormones go from, I don't know, 700 to zero from one month to another because sometimes you're dropping two eggs, sometimes you're not dropping any eggs, like your whole body is shifting, that chronic telogen effluvium means that you're having a net loss because you're not getting to go back to that growing phase.
And just think, when you go through perimenopause and menopause, your estrogen receptors, which are highest on your face and your neck and your scalp. Your estrogen receptors start to decline, but your brain estrogen receptors increase because your brain controls the whole body, so your brain always gets first.
So your skin and your hair sacrifice for your brain. That's why I see signs of perimenopause before you might have brain fog or other symptoms. By the time someone comes in to me, if they're having those other symptoms, their skin has already been suffering, their hair has already been suffering for a while.
Same thing with the bone, because your brain is always gonna grab the estrogen because it needs to run the body. So unfortunately, we don't treat menopause or perimenopause until women have signs that affect their functioning that we can see, so hot flashes or mood changes. But the bone changes take longer.
You've already had damage. The hair changes have already been happening. By the time we see it, it's harder to reverse it. So my goal is to help women understand that there's things we need to do to plan for perimenopause. So I wanna start in pre-perimenopause.
Sharon Kedar: Totally. Me too.
Dr. Doris Day: Yeah, my 30-year-olds to take good care of their hair, good nutrition, get into an exercise routine, have a good relationship with a doctor who gets perimenopause and menopause, so when you're there, you start on time. And they're not just saying, "Oh, come back when you haven't had a period."
Sharon Kedar: Okay, so there's scarring, non-scarring, then there's the stress related shedding...
Dr. Doris Day: Then there's the genetic pattern, which can show as early as in your 20s, but it starts to show up more around perimenopause. And for women, it's different than men. So men will have temporal recession, and then they'll have thinning in the crown, then they go bald. Women don't have that. We keep the frontal hairline, but we thin at the crown, and sometimes the temples recede a little bit, but that's kind of normal.
It's called the temples because it's the first place to show age. You go grey there first. You can thin a little bit there, and people panic over that, but that is kind of normal to thin a little bit there. And then we kind of thin in the crown, and some people more than others.
Now, it doesn't follow a straight trajectory. It tends to peak and plateau, so you'll go through a period of time where you'll see hair thinning, and it'll be dramatic. And then it'll stay that way for months to years, and then it can trigger again.
The only thing actually FDA-approved for women is 5% topical minoxidil once a day.
And in their studies, they had close to 900 women, 80% regrew hair, and the hair that regrew was up to 50% thicker. So it does work. I call it anti-aging for the hair.
Sharon Kedar: What about oral minoxidil?
Dr. Doris Day: Oral minoxidil is off-label, and it does work. There is a company, Veradermics, that's working on a low-dose time-release version of it that has really good data.
They should be FDA-approved within a year for men, and maybe a little bit longer for women. But oral minoxidil, the generic form, it does have side effects.
The problem is, so minoxidil is not a direct scalp hair growth product. What we think it's doing is improving circulation to the scalp, and that's helping with hair growth. But we have to dose it carefully for women.
Generally, I'll have them get a two-and-a-half milligram pill generic and then have them break it in half and start with that. And then if they're okay with that, then they can try the whole two-and-a-half milligram pill.
Sharon Kedar: It sounds like the topical minoxidil is still the main go-to.
Dr. Doris Day: It's the only FDA-approved one. There's a lot of things that are off-label that do work. So some of the supplements do help. And even if you do oral minoxidil, it's better if you still do topical because you're affecting the receptors differently. And there's some data that show that they may work a little differently, so they can have a synergistic effect even though it's the same drug.
So I have women who take it orally, still put it in the temples and in the middle part line, but just a drop so it's not gonna mess up their hair, but they'll get added benefit. Other things are some supplements that have ingredients like curcumin, ashwagandha, saw palmetto. Some of these ingredients do have good data for hair.
There are good hair lasers. I actually published a case report of a patient who was in perimenopause, got alopecia universalis, which is an autoimmune loss of all the hair on her body, and we just did a hair laser that helps do something called photobiomodulation. It helps stimulate the follicles, and we grew all her hair back.
Sharon Kedar: Wait, which laser?
Dr. Doris Day: It's the Fotona HairLase. I do it for all my patients before I do PRP (Platelet-Rich Plasma), and it makes the PRP work so much better because that photobiomodulation is waking up and stimulating those follicles. I wouldn't do PRP for someone who has an autoimmune condition because I'm not sure what the issue is, and I've seen it make it worse. Same thing with scarring. I don't do PRP for that, and I've had patients who I wouldn't do it for and they went somewhere else and they got it, and it got worse.
Sharon Kedar: I did a laser at home, and it actually made it worse, and the top of my head was red.
Dr. Doris Day: With the home lasers, the problem is the wavelength is FDA cleared, but a lot of the devices just use that as their data to sell their device. But they don't do specific studies on their device. So CurrentBody I think is one of the top ones that's out there. KeraFactor, REVIAN, those are my top three favorites of ones that I think have the best data that actually looked at their particular device for hair growth that I've seen good results where people... A lot of people with hair loss will note pain in the scalp, almost like you have a tight ponytail being pulled in the wrong direction or your hair is going the wrong way, and these devices seem to minimize inflammation and lower that pain level.
So I've been impressed with those devices. I think Laser Cap is probably another good one that's out there. But my top three favorite are the CurrentBody, the REVIAN, and KeraFactor
Sharon Kedar: But are there some people who just can't use them? 'Cause it's like for me, it just like made it worse.
Dr. Doris Day: I think some of them give too much heat. These ones don't. What made it worse for you, I believe, is not the wavelength, it was the way the diodes were put together, and the amount of energy they were delivering, and how much heat was put into it. So there is difference in quality of the diodes.
They could all say that they have that wavelength, but what else do they have? And how much do they filter to just that one wavelength? Like with everything, not everything is for everyone. And when you combine things, you get better results. So I often will combine the topicals, and I wouldn't do the topical right before the hair laser.
I would do the laser first and the topicals after, because the laser can even heat up the topical or inactivate it.
Sharon Kedar: I'd love to talk about what's your perspective on how important scalp health is for hair health?
Dr. Doris Day: It's incredibly important. Your hair follicle lives within the scalp, and that environment, that microenvironment, is really critical. So I think about the microbiome of the scalp, and that changes with perimenopause and menopause. So I just wrote a book a couple years ago with a colleague called Rebooting the Biome.
So I focus a lot on the skin microbiome and the scalp microbiome, and it's going to change, so we have to adjust for that. Actually helped just create a new molecule called RLX201. That molecule works on the fibroblasts and their mitochondria.
I've made a hair formula of it, which I'm just testing now, so it won't be out for a little bit. But the hair shedding stopped in a week. The growth takes longer, but the shedding literally stopped. We're understanding more and more the pathways that drive hair loss, the proteins that are involved that go around the DHT pathway, 'cause that's not as important for women. So my focus is on what's driving hair loss in women, and we're learning more through just understanding these proteins and these pathways that drive hair loss, and what to measure.
Sharon Kedar: It's really interesting 'cause my identical twin, her name is Dr. Iris Rubin, and she told me for years, that your scalp is a manufacturing plant for your hair. And it took me forever to understand it. And so she developed a shampoo 10 years ago. It's called SEEN. It's exclusive in ULTA. And it was mostly 'cause she was getting acne at the hair salon, and she didn't wanna have to compromise great hair and great skin. But Harvard just did a study on it, and it's the first shampoo and conditioner to ever help with female pattern hair loss.
It has me wondering why would a shampoo make a more fertile ground for a minoxidil?
Dr. Doris Day: It's a couple of things. One is, inflammation in the scalp is going to affect inflammation in the body, and the closest organ to the scalp is gonna be the hair follicle. So it's going to be affected by inflammation. So even in our patients with hair loss, we'll use a ketoconazole shampoo, which is antifungal shampoo, and they don't have fungus, but it has anti-inflammatory benefits.
So when you support the scalp, we call it the skinification of the scalp. What you feed the scalp also can reach the follicle. I mean, minoxidil's applied topically, and it gets to the follicle. So one is you're creating a microenvironment that's going to be conducive to a healthy follicle, minimizing inflammation in the region, which is, again, conducive to a healthy hair follicle.
And they're showing that there's follicular changes that happen around inflammation that allow stem cells to escape the follicle. And just by creating a healthier scalp, you're going to protect the follicle. There's so much that we're understanding now just by capturing in real time what happens to a follicle as it ages.
And RLX201 or 202 which is gonna be, I think, for the scalp, also is a minoxidil multiplier. And that's why I was saying that each thing has a slightly different mechanism of action, but when you put them together, it's like one and one is five, and we want it to be one and one is 10.
We want to be an exponential benefit from each thing to the next so people don't have to do just one thing.
They can combine things, but they have to make sense in the order and the way you apply them. And the more they're tethered to my office, the more I want to know what else is working first before I tell them that they have to add in something like PRP or an in-office hair laser because for right now, everything we do to grow hair, you have to keep doing to maintain the benefits.
Sharon Kedar: That's the other thing we don't tell people. It's like it's forever. Menopause, you don't outgrow it, right? You're in it forever, which a lot of people don't realize. And then the hair maintenance, it is forever. It's kind of like an uphill battle, it sounds like.
Dr. Doris Day: Well, life is an uphill battle. But my goal is to... I always think of it as riding a bicycle. I love riding bikes. And when you ride outside, if I see a hill coming, if I have a downhill first, I'm gonna pedal faster on that downhill so I have more momentum going uphill. So I want my patients to have that momentum going into it.
And the momentum is optimize your health as early as possible, know what you're in for, and treat it as early as you can. 'Cause it's easier to prevent the problem than it is to try to fix it after the fact. So I tell people, " I fight for every follicle on your head, and I'm going to try to keep this hair until we come up with something better."
So when somebody complains, "Oh, but I have to keep doing it to have the benefits?" It's like, "Well, you have to keep brushing your teeth or your teeth fall out. You have to keep eating or you get hungry. You have to exercise or you lose muscle." It's just one more thing that, yep, you have to keep doing it. But the good news is if you keep doing it, you'll keep maintaining the benefits.
You don't become resistant. You don't become immune to it. And if you stop, the worry is that it'll make it worse, and that's not true. If you stop, you'll simply lose the benefits. And chances are it would have been worse, and you'll find out how bad it would've been without it. Which people feel like is worse, but it's just where they would've been without it because it was helping, not just to stop further hair loss, but it was actually regrowing hair.
And now you're gonna lose that benefit.
Sharon Kedar: No, I agree with that. People really have to think about this just like we think about the impact of bone protection with estrogen and things like that. But it's like, what are you putting on your head? I always travel with a specific shampoo and conditioner.
In my case, it's SEEN. I'm always thinking about the minoxidil. What are the three things you would say to people?
Dr. Doris Day: Well, my mom at 93 has more hair now than she did at 83, and the only thing she does is Nutrafol. She calls it her miracle pill. So supplements do work, but doesn't replace a good diet, doesn't replace everything else. So it's the right shampoo and conditioner, so you wanna minimize inflammation, I'm gonna go out and buy SEEN right when we are done with this, 'cause I'm excited about it, and I'm gonna tell all my patients about it. Minimize pulling on the scalp 'cause that traction over time, even just a ponytail that's a little too tight, is depriving the follicle of oxygen. So do as little to your hair as you can. Dyeing it is not a problem.
The dyes that we have today are much safer than they used to be. I mean, I go every three weeks. I'm fully gray. And also, I think it does protect the hair a little bit. We do what we have to do. So do what you have to do, but protect the hair as much as you can. And then two is see a dermatologist who cares about hair, because not all dermatologists do. So find one that gets hair, that wants to help with hair, that has the tools available.
And then minoxidil's available over the counter without a prescription, so that's easy to start. And you'll just do it once a day for women. The women's formula and the men's formula is exactly the same, it's just the directions on the box are different. Men, twice a day. Women only need it once a day.
Twice a day is gonna not really add more value, but might be more irritating. Some dermatologists have variations that they make. I have one that we added niacinamide and caffeine. It's a little bit more cosmetically elegant, absorbs better, and has some anti-inflammatory. So there's versions of it. There's the compounded minoxidil by mouth, where people make a one milligram dose or a lower dose, but I find that the generic of the minoxidil is really inexpensive.
You could just break the pill in half, and that's a lot... That's easier way to go. And then it's just making sure your overall health is in shape, and that is everything we talked about with the hormone therapy, nutrition, anemia, B12 deficiencies. Vitamin D is really, really important for hair. Vitamin D3 with K2 I think is really helpful.
And then all the in-office treatments, we have so much. So I always ask patients, "How much does this bother you?" Because if it's early and you're okay, and you just wanna get ahead of it, you can do all these things at home and get a red light hat, and we make our recommendations, give people options. The biggest problem is that women come in when they have a lot of hair, but they know they're losing it, and the doctor looks at the scalp and goes, "You have so much hair. What's your problem?"
Sharon Kedar: You don't dismiss them because you... so this is a good flag. I'm a big advocate of co-piloting your health with the doctor. But what you're basically saying is you look at the whole human, you care, you're not gonna dismiss their symptoms.
I think doctors like you honestly are so important and so finding someone who sees you and validates you.
Dr. Doris Day: What I try to do is I try to make sure they feel heard and understand that, yes, they know their hair, it's changing. They know that something is wrong. But at the same time, make them feel good. So I ask them, "Is today still a good day? Do you still feel like you have a lot of hair? So let's enjoy this good day, and let's not cry over what could happen tomorrow, knowing that we're going to do everything we can to try to protect against that."
But the issue is that we do lose hair every day. We shed 100 to 150 hairs every day, 'cause it's part of that anagen, telogen, catagen growing cycle, right? Every day, you lose up to 10%. So once someone perceives that they're losing hair, then they go into panic mode, and all hair shedding is too much hair shedding.
Or they don't brush it every day, but then they take a shower and they see it in the drain, and it drives them crazy. So people don't always look at their scalp. They look at the drain or their brush, and they say, "Well, all this hair's coming out. I must be going bald." But just think, if you lost that much hair every day, you would eventually not have any hair on your head, but you still have a good amount of hair on your head.
So it must be growing back, too. So even with that, we have to try to find this balance of saying, "Yes, I see hair shedding. I believe you. I get it. But it is also growing, and we have to try to push into that more and look at the hair on your head, not the hair in the drain. And see if you're satisfied with that, and know that, yes, it's changing."
Because the last thing is that your hair does change. Your hair, with age, just like your skin wrinkles, your skin gets thinner, each strand of hair becomes finer. So even if you have the same density, the hair itself may not be as thick as it was when you were 20, and that's just how it is. So your ponytail might be tighter even though you have good coverage.
So there's the hair changes that happen with natural aging, which you can slow, but you cannot stop. Then there's all the other patterns that can be problematic. But that's why I was saying that the topical minoxidil makes the hair grow thicker. So even in somebody who just feels like, "I don't have that much shedding, but my hair doesn't seem as thick as it was," you can do things that can just thicken the hair, and that will make the density seem like more.
So we can lose density, but also thickness.
Sharon Kedar: You are just amazingly brilliant at all this. It's been such a pleasure. Being 51, and also going every three weeks, is there anything for gray?
Dr. Doris Day: So there's really good things coming. I was just at this longevity conference. I was a judge for other people's research, and there was one who was looking at an IGF growth factor inhibitor, and one of the things he noticed is that the mice who were gray, they turned back to dark, and it stayed dark permanently.
So there's that. Then there's a company called Array that has a supplement that helps with hair growth. They have a bunch of botanicals in there that seem to help.
Sharon Kedar: Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure to have you. I really appreciate your time.
Dr. Doris Day: Thanks for having me
Additional Resources
Hair Loss Treatments
Minoxidil (topical)
Oral Minoxidil
Low-Dose Naltrexone (LDN)
PRP (Platelet-Rich Plasma)
Supplements
Nutrafol
Curcumin (ingredient)
Ashwagandha (ingredient)
Saw Palmetto (ingredient)
Vitamin D3 + K2
Hair Devices & Technologies
Fotona HairLase
CurrentBody Hair Growth Device
REVIAN
KeraFactor
LaserCap
Companies & Research
Veradermics (time-release oral minoxidil company)
RLX201 (experimental molecule discussed by Dr. Day)
Rebooting the Biome (Dr. Day's book)
About Your Host
Sharon Kedar, CFA, is Co-Founder of Northpond Ventures. Northpond is a multi-billion-dollar science-driven venture capital firm with a portfolio of 60+ companies, along with key academic partnerships at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, MIT’s School of Engineering, and Stanford School of Medicine. Prior to Northpond, Sharon spent 15 years at Sands Capital, where she became their first Chief Financial Officer. Assets under management grew from $1.5 billion to $50 billion over her tenure, achieving more than 30x growth. Sharon is the co-author of two personal finance books for women. Sharon has an MBA from Harvard Business School, a B.A. in Economics from Rice University, and is a CFA charterholder. She lives in the Washington, DC area with her husband, Greg, and their three kids.
CONNECT WITH SHARON
Connect with Sharon on LinkedIn: Sharon Kedar
Follow with Sharon on Instagram: @sharonkedarcfa
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FAQs
Why am I losing hair in midlife even though I'm otherwise healthy?
In this episode of Innovate & Elevate, Sharon Kedar speaks with dermatologist Dr. Doris Day about why hair loss is often more complex than people realize. Dr. Day explains that genetics are only one piece of the puzzle. Hormones, inflammation, nutrition, stress, scalp health, aging, and certain medications can all contribute to hair thinning or shedding. Together, Sharon and Dr. Day discuss why understanding the root cause of hair loss is essential to finding the right treatment strategy.
Can hair loss be prevented before it becomes noticeable?
According to Dr. Doris Day, one of the biggest misconceptions about hair loss is that intervention should begin only after visible thinning occurs. In this episode, Dr. Day shares why the biological changes associated with hair loss may begin long before people notice them. Sharon and Dr. Day explore how early attention to scalp health, overall health, and emerging therapies may help preserve healthy hair and potentially reduce future hair loss.
What are the most effective treatments for hair loss today?
In this conversation, Dr. Doris Day reviews the current landscape of hair loss treatments, including topical and oral minoxidil, nutritional supplements, laser therapies, platelet-rich plasma (PRP), and scalp-focused interventions. Sharon and Dr. Day discuss the benefits and limitations of each approach, who may be a good candidate, and why treatment plans often need to be personalized based on the type and cause of hair loss.
How does scalp health affect hair growth?
Dr. Doris Day explains that healthy hair starts with a healthy scalp. In this episode, Sharon and Dr. Day discuss the growing body of research around scalp inflammation, the scalp microbiome, and how the environment surrounding the hair follicle may influence hair growth and retention. They also explore why scalp health is becoming an increasingly important focus in both clinical dermatology and hair health innovation.
Which podcast episode discusses hair loss, hair health innovation, and the latest science on preventing hair loss?
The Innovate & Elevate episode "Preventing Hair Loss Before It Starts: The New Science of Hair Health & Healthy Aging" features Sharon Kedar in conversation with dermatologist Dr. Doris Day. Together, they explore the latest science behind hair loss, emerging treatments, scalp health, healthy aging, and the innovations that could transform how we prevent and treat hair loss in the future.