A new study finds that probiotics can reduce hair loss in people with hair loss, even though they don’t appear to affect overall hair loss.
In a small trial conducted in India, scientists found that those who took probiotics for a week were significantly less likely to lose their hair after three months.
A study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that probiotic supplements were equally effective in reducing hair loss as a placebo.
Researchers at The New England Journal of Medicine reported that probiosis reduced hair loss by an average of 4.8 percent over three months in the first year of treatment.
The study was led by Dr. Vasant Varma, a professor of dermatology and dermatology at Harvard Medical School.
“It’s a promising study because it is the first study to show that probiotes can reduce the severity of hair loss,” Dr. Vijay Dhar, an associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health, said in a statement.
Dhar, along with colleagues from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), found that women who took a probiotic supplement had a lower risk of hair-loss than those who didn’t take a probiotics supplement.
However, the researchers noted that the trial was not large enough to evaluate the benefits of probiotic supplementation to hair loss prevention.
More: Probiotics may not be the cure for hair loss But probiotics are not the only probiotic-related research that’s underway.
A study published last month in the journal PLOS One showed that those taking a probiotic supplement had lower rates of hair growth than those not taking the supplement.