Word: haired
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...paper published this week in the prestigious Archives of General Psychiatry offers a simple new hope for trichotillomania sufferers. In a small trial of 50 hair pullers, more than half of those who took an over-the-counter antioxidant called N-acetylcysteine, which is available in pill form at mainstream stores like GNC and Vitamin Shoppe, had improvement of symptoms after 12 weeks, compared with 16% of those taking a placebo. (See how to prevent illness...
...findings bear out, they may herald a potential new treatment for an age-old condition. As psychiatric symptoms go, hair-pulling is among the earliest recorded. According to Dr. Jon Grant, a trichotillomania expert at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine and the lead author of the new paper, Hippocrates himself said that in order to test whether patients were faking their illness, doctors must ask whether they are pulling out their hair. The behavior is so commonly associated with distress that the stock phrase to describe a stressful situation is that it causes you to tear your hair...
...seem wired to attack our hair under traumatic conditions, possibly because forcibly extracting hair is painful; it can divert attention from stress to the more immediate matter of how to solve a pressing problem. For chronic hair pullers, that diversion turns into addictive psychological relief. Some people with trichotillomania pull out hairs not only from their heads but also from their pubic areas and armpits; as many as 20% eat their hair; a small minority pull other people's hairs. "Many say it's not painful but more of a sense of just a tug, one that provides a calming...
Likewise, in Grant's 12-week study, those compulsive hair pullers who were randomly assigned to receive 1,200 to 2,400 milligrams of N-acetylcysteine a day experienced a 40% reduction in scores on a test designed to measure trichotillomania. Unfortunately the patients did not report a substantial improvement in quality of life, but Grant believes that may be because three months is too soon for unsightly bald spots to have grown back...
...host of other mental disorders.) While there's been less research on drugs that manipulate glutamate - perhaps because it can be modulated fairly easily with nonprescription amino acids like N-acetylcysteine - the new study suggests the neurotransmitter may play a key role not only in the rare condition of hair-pulling but also in other obsessive-compulsive problems...