For Patients with Alopecia, Eczema Drug Could Promote Hair Regrowth

Dipilumab, a medication to treat eczema, has helped a patient with alopecia who hasn’t been able to grow hair since she was two years-old experience significant hair regrowth, according to a case published in JAMA Dermatology.

The 13-year-old patient had been struggling to manage her eczema since she was 7 months old. After dabbling with immunosuppressant drugs like prednisone and methotrexate, in July 2017, she started receiving weekly injections of dupilumab, an eczema treatment that had recently been granted Food and Drug Administration approval. After six weeks of injections, not only did her eczema start to clear up but she also felt light vellus hairs growing on her scalp.

Hair continued to grow until seven months into treatment when she had to stop for two months due to a change in her health insurance. During that period, her newly grown hair began to shed, but upon restarting dipilumab in April 2018, her hair began to grow again.

The patient’s hair could have been growing back because dupilumab targets the same immune system pathway that’s associated with both eczema and autoimmune hair loss. According to the report’s senior author Maryanne Makredes Senna, MD, a dermatology instructor at Harvard Medical School, “It's hard to know whether dupilumab could induce hair growth in other alopecia patients, but I suspect it may be helpful in patients with extensive active eczema and active alopecia areata,"she said. “We've submitted a proposal for a clinical trial using dupilumab in this patient population and hope to be able to investigate it further in the near future."