Has a cure been found for the autoimmune disease alopecia areata, which causes spotty baldness in children and adults? Researchers from Hadassah Medical Center who gave a patient a cancer treatment drug that is also being studied as a possible treatment for rheumatoid arthritis discovered that it is also effective in treating alopecia. Alopecia areata affects some 2% of the population, causing sufferers varying degrees of baldness. "The disease is caused by an inflammatory process around the hair follicle that causes it to fall out," explained Dr. Yuval Ramot, an attending physician in the Department of Dermatology and Venereal Diseases at Hadassah. In most cases of alopecia areata, the hair loss is concentrated in particular areas of the scalp, beard, or other part of the body. According to Ramot, there are currently "no successful treatments for the disease. There is treatment with steroids, which suppress the immune system and have serious side effects, and can't be administered continually." The new treatment for alopecia was discovered by chance when a 16-year-old boy who in addition to alopecia areata suffered from a genetic disorder was administered the drug baricitinib. "It was like a miracle. His hair started to grow in the bald spots that had resisted treatment for years," Ramot said. Experiments carried out in conjunction with researchers from Columbia University on mice and in clinical trials found the drug to be effective. Ramot said that "baricitinib belongs to a family of medicines ... known as JAK inhibitors that are currently used to treat inflammatory diseases or cancer. Since the mechanism at the root of alopecia areata is a process of inflammation around the hair follicle, the use of inhibitors on that path can be effective against this disease as well. There is also evidence from researchers throughout the world that drugs from the same family have been shown effective in treatment-resistant patients." The research, which Ramot conducted with Professor Abraham Zlotogorski and Professor Yackov Berkun, was published in the EBioMedicine journal.
