Bare head

The fourth edition of Alopecia Areata Day was celebrated on 17 December, a day to raise awareness of this pathology, which falls under the "rare pathologies", therefore more laboriously supported by scientific research. In Italy, the protagonist was AIPAF (Italian Association of Alopecia and Friends Patients) which involved sixteen Italian hospitals in this initiative.

The term alopecia means the total disappearance or decrease of hair and/or hair or the production of finer and shorter hair. The causes are many and the progression is highly variable from subject to subject; all forms are united by factors that hinder the physiological functioning of the hair follicle, responsible for the growth of the hair or fur.

The first difficulty linked to this pathology is to identify what is the triggering cause of the outwardly evident symptom. In all forms of alopecia areata, the immune system attacks healthy hair follicles as 'foreign', causing them to become smaller and slowing down or stopping their function altogether. Other factors, both environmental and genetic, intervene in the onset and progression of the disease, so much so that alopecia can affect people of all ages, both sexes and all ethnic groups.

There are some treatments for alopecia areata that are sometimes effective, but to date there are no treatments that work for all patients: therefore there is no valid therapy for all forms of the disease, including the most serious and difficult to tractable. For this reason, research in this area is invaluable.

The most striking aspect, reading the stories of people involved in this pathology, concerns the important impact that this event has on the quality of their lives. A song comes to mind: «Without hair I am a page without pictures, a perfume without a bottle, a closed door without a handle». What doctors and scientists see as a mass of proteins arranged in a more or less orderly way to form straight or curly hair are part of our identity. You experience a strange solitude with an image of yourself in front of the mirror very different from what you have known in the past. For many, this moment becomes an opportunity to face a path of rebirth and rediscovery, transforming a situation of fatigue and suffering into an opportunity for strength for oneself and for others.


Valentina Turinetto
NP January 2023