Reversal of hair loss in Mice with “sugar gel”

@Serotoninskeptic

"Ray Peat: I've been thinking that with a concentrated glucose solution, you could probably activate hair growth just by keeping your scalp moistened with glucose."

https://dannyroddy.substack.com/p/lost-conversations-with-ray-peat

"...excessive glucose is able to increase the expression of hair inductive genes and elongation of hair shaft."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7078220/

In the above study they used a concentration of 10mM to boost hair growth and mimick excessive glucose . That is just 180mg per 100ml . The issue is that the hair shaft sot relatively deep in the scalp and not much /everything will reach the shaft so to account for the loss i would go for 50mM or approximately 1g or 1% of glucose per 100ml .

EDIT : just saw they used d-glucose aka Dextrose . I wanted to use sucrose (table sugar) but I don't think sucrose can substitute as the scalp lacks the enzymes to split up table sugar into glucose and fructose and sucrose is a much bigger molecule, making absorption even trickier

On top of that i would use 30% percent alcohol and 10% propylene glycol which sterilize the solution and help absorption and penetration. This is inspired by the formula of Minoxidil, which seems to be absorbed well.

So the updated formula would look like this :

30% ethanol
10% propylene glycol
1% NMN
1% Apple polyphenols
1% of dextrose
Rest: Water
(add taurine ,caffeine,... to your liking)

Total Solids:

Dextrose: 1 g
Apple Peel Polyphenols: 1 g
NMN: 1 g
Total: 3 g

Total Liquids:

Water: 70 mL
Ethanol: 20 mL
Propylene Glycol: 10 mL
Total: 100 mL

@Gaston

Mauritio

Interesting. The hair follicle seems to be use mostly aerobic glycolisis for energy production.

"...the hair follicle exhibits aerobic glycolysis, in that of the total glucose utilized by the hair follicle, only 10% is oxidized to CO2."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2045676/

This study goes hand in hand with the one above. It shows that hair follicles have their one corri cycle (producing glucose out of lactate) which makes sense since they're using mainly aerobic glycolisis, which provides lots of lactate as a waste product . They use that lactate and form glycogen out of it! Which in turn helps keep the hair follicle in anagen growing phases.

So if the hair can use lactate to make glycogen surely it can use glucose.
Usually glucose can either be directly metabolized to energy or converted to G6P via hexokinase serving as a building block for glyocgen .Which makes the glucose hypothesis even more attractive because the supply of glucose wouldn't have to be constant (which isn't realistic anyway) since the hair can synthesize glycogen and store it for when glucose levels drop, keeping the hair in an anagen phase.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8531296/

Mauritio

This study suggests that the higher G6PD is the more anagen hairs you have.

G6PD creates R5P (ribose-5-phosphate).

This might be why ribose could work.
Because ribose is also converted to R5P.
If you already have more R5P, you need to convert less G6P into it, and thus leaves more for glyocgen synthesis. So ribose indirectly increases glyocgen levels.

Or it could have to do with nucleotide synthesis .
R5P is used for it and maybe nucleotide Synthesis is an overlooked player in hair loss ? Haven't looked into it.

Makes me wonder if I should add some ribose to the above formula...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10664855/

AinmBeo

@Mauritio said in Reversal of hair loss in Mice with “sugar gel”:

NMN
What is NMN?

AinmBeo

@Mauritio said in Reversal of hair loss in Mice with “sugar gel”:

ethanol
10% propylene glycol
1% NMN
1% Apple polyphenols

Is it reasonable to use a high alcohol content vodka for "ethanol"?

Also, what apple polyphenols product have you been using?

Mauritio

@AinmBeo you might have to use proportionally more .

I just started using a new one, but it's a German product. Try to find one that has no other ingredients.

Gaston

@Mauritio Have you actually gotten all of that to dissolve? I think I would need to prepare two separate solutions in order to get all of those ingredients to dissolve.

NMN is sill pretty expensive if you're buying stuff that's verifiably real.

The dextrose I sometimes spray onto my scalp an hour prior to showering, but I can't handle having it in my hair all day long.

But yeah, I hope you try it out.

Mauritio

@Gaston Everything but the dextrose, because I don't have it yet.
But it dissolved very easily .

True the NMN is still kinda expensive comes down to 15-30€/ month if I calculated it right. But I'll try it out for a while and then decide if it's worth keeping.

I put the new formula on my scalp for 45 minutes today and my hair looked really good afterwards, as if I used a conditioner of something like that. Didn't get this effect with my previous apple polyphenol solution so it must be something from the new formula.

Mauritio

@Mauritio said in Reversal of hair loss in Mice with “sugar gel”:

Interesting. The hair follicle seems to be use mostly aerobic glycolisis for energy production.

"...the hair follicle exhibits aerobic glycolysis, in that of the total glucose utilized by the hair follicle, only 10% is oxidized to CO2."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2045676/

I couldn't wrap my head around why the hair uses 90-95% aerobic glycolisis for energy , generating large amounts of lactate, even in the presence of oxygen.

From what I've read it has the following reasons:

Fast ATP generation: hair is one of the most rapidly dividing type of cells in the body . It constantly needs new ATP, which is generated faster by glycolisis . While OxPhos generates more ATP it takes a lot longer and ...
...Aerobic glycolisis leads to copious amounts of intermediate generation like lactate and pyruvate . Which can be used to build nucleotides and keratin for new hair . In OxPhos the carbon goes towards CO2.
The hair is a low oxygen environment similarly to tumours thus both use aerobic glycolisis (Warburg effect) l

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/exd.14300

Mauritio

Baicalin outperforms Minoxidil in hair growth study .

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9699788/#sec3

Here's another in vivo study in which it helps hair growth. Doesn't quite outperform Minoxidil, but results are still decent.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29336472/

Promotes anagen hair phase in mice.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00210-014-1075-0