Word: trichotillomania
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...brains can give rise to all manner of odd psychiatric problems, but one of the strangest is trichotillomania - better known as hair-pulling. The uncontrollable desire to yank out one's hair may seem like a freaky sideshow diagnosis, but the disorder is actually not so uncommon, affecting perhaps 2 million American adults over 22. Exact numbers are hard to come by since people with the condition often hide it - sometimes they don't even appear in public because of their embarrassing, mangy bald spots. There is no approved treatment...
...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...
...which has about 10 million bald or balding men, leading dermatologists say that the condition has many causes, some known, some not, some curable, some not. For ordinary baldness in which the hair follicles die, they say the best "cure" is a toupee or wig. For baldness due to trichotillomania (the compulsion to tear the hair out), the best cure is to stop tearing the hair...