What every Black woman should know about hair loss and fibroids
From Minority/ Black Health Blog
A recent study shows that Black women with a relatively similar type of hair loss may also be at a high risk of developing fibroids.
What are fibroids? Fibroids are fibrous growths that develop in or around the uterus. On average, about 80 to 90 percent of Black women and 70 percent of white women develop fibroids by the time they turn 50. Not to worry, these growths are mostly benign and noncancerous.
The research, wherein four years of data of over 487,000 adult Black women were studied, also included data regarding a hair loss condition called the central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia (CCCA).
Black women are the ones usually affected by CCCA, which makes it the most common hair loss condition in this group.
It is discovered in the research that almost 14 percent of women affected by CCCA also had fibroids while only 3 percent of women without CCCA had fibroids. This shows that women with CCCA have five times higher chances to develop fibroids
“The cause of the link between the two conditions remains un-clear,” says Dr. Crystal Aguh, the author of the research and an assistant professor of dermatology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.
Even though the research still does not prove that one condition causes the other, there seems to be some kind of connection between the two. Nevertheless, the findings still suggest that women with CCCA be checked for fibroids or any excess fibrous growth.
The research also considered that Blacks, in general, are more likely to develop some conditions that involve scarring and that scarring is one of the results linked to the beginning of CCCA.
Consequently, the findings of the research show that CCCA-linked scarring is resemblant to the type of fibrous-tissue scarring associated with fibroids, which could be the reason why there is a higher risk to develop fibroids with the hair-loss condition.
