I am new to this site so hope that this post works - apologies to all if it goes wrong.

A bit of background on me first - I have recently been diagnosed with FFA, but have suffered from it for at least 3 years, although I didn't realise it. Initially I had severe burning and itching on my legs and only recently realised that most of the hair on them is now gone (I'm blond, so not immediately obvious). My eyebrows went about 2 1/2 years ago and again because I'm blond, they didn't look too bad so I didn't really pay much attention. It was only last summer that I realised my hairline had moved back nearly an inch and it has taken until a couple of months ago to get a diagnosis. Other than this I am fit and healthy do lots of exercise and all blood tests apart from the one noted below have been entirely normal.

I was fine with losing my hair on other parts of my body, but loss of my head hair is really stressing me out and reading this forum is one of the few things that keeps me sane. I like to have everything neatly ordered and just not knowing why this is happening or when it might stop is so infuriating. I am 46 years old and have a 5 year old daughter. I had a severe postpartum haemorrhage and was in surgery for quite a while to stop it. Since giving birth I have also been on two long courses of antibiotics - one for what the doc thought was rosacea (I now wonder if it is linked to FFA - unsightly lumps on my face) and one for pneumonia. So I have a few things in common with other members.

I don't think my dermatologist was really that interested and just prescribed dermovate cream. I did however ask about a possible hormone link as when my GP did all the initial blood tests she said that everything was fine but the ratio of some of my hormone levels was a bit unusual and symptomatic of polycystic ovary syndrome. I don't have any of the other symptoms of PCOS so this wasn't pursued. The burning on my scalp and eyebrows does seem much worse around the time of my period though and I wonder if there could be a link. I wondered if anyone else had investigated this possibility.

In my quest to find a reason I regularly trawl the internet and have just found an article about a study that has been done in Spain where in tests on 111 patients antiandrogen treatment (finasteride and dutasteride) resulted in improvement in 47% of patients and stabilisation in 53%. This seemed like pretty good results to me and I wondered if it is worth going back to my doc and asking about this or if anyone who is seeing some of the experts in this field already could ask about it.

The article is published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology and is credited to Sergio Vano-Galvan and others. I hope this gives people enough info to find the article but will also try to attach two links if anyone wants to look at the headlines (you have to buy the article if you want to read the full text)

     http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190962213013066

 http://www.healio.com/dermatology/practice-management/news/online/%...

Apologies for such a long post but I'd be really interested to hear peoples thoughts and thank you so much for setting up this forum, knowing that I am not alone is really helping.