Researchers tested baricitinib, a pill originally developed for rheumatoid arthritis that blocks the immune signaling implicated in the attack on hair follicles, in two international trials enrolling patients who had lost at least half their scalp hair for more than six months.
In the BRAVE-AA1 and BRAVE-AA2 trials, researchers led by Brett King of Yale randomly assigned 1,200 adults to baricitinib or placebo. After 36 weeks, about four in ten patients on the higher dose had regrown at least 80 percent of their scalp hair, compared with roughly one in twenty on placebo.
The drug does not cure alopecia areata outright; patients who stopped baricitinib in follow-up studies often lost the regrown hair within months, meaning treatment has to continue indefinitely. Regulators also attached a boxed warning shared by the whole drug class, citing risks of infection, blood clots and cancer seen in similar immune-suppressing pills.
Read the original study
A pill that calmed the attack on hair follicles.
Source
- King, B., Ohyama, M., Kwon, O., Zlotogorski, A., Ko, J., Mesinkovska, N. A., Hordinsky, M., Dutronc, Y., Wu, W.-S., McCollam, J., Chiasserini, C., Yu, G., Stanley, S., Holzwarth, K., DeLozier, A. M., Sinclair, R., & BRAVE-AA Investigators (2022). Two Phase 3 Trials of Baricitinib for Alopecia Areata. New England Journal of Medicine, 386(18), 1687–1699. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2110343