Someone tell George Costanza to quit using Jerry Seinfeld’s phone to call China, because some scientists at Yale may be putting hair restoration scam artists out of business. According to Yale News, a 25-year old man with alopecia universalis had been the subject of an 8-month trial to test possible treatments and cures for his disease, and he successfully grew a full head of hair, as well as eyebrows, eyelashes and all of the other hair that dudes have in their dude places.
Go ahead and take a victory lap, Yale scientists. You crazy kids have earned it.
“The results are exactly what we hoped for,” said Dr. Brett A. King, assistant professor of dermatology at Yale University School of Medicine and senior author of a paper reporting the results online June 18 in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology. “This is a huge step forward in the treatment of patients with this condition. While it’s one case, we anticipated the successful treatment of this man based on our current understanding of the disease and the drug. We believe the same results will be duplicated in other patients, and we plan to try.” (Via Yale News)
The key to success in this trial was the FDA-approved arthritis drug tofacitinib citrate [Ed.- which costs almost $47 per pill, and this patient was taking two to three pills per day], which was probably sitting under their noses the whole time until one of the scientists said, “Hey, what if…” King and his team knew that the drug had already been used in treating plaque psoriasis, which this patient also has, as well as alopecia areata in mice, so they believed that it would be ideal in treating both diseases at the same time in a human patient.
Otherwise, the results may have looked like this: