The medication is helping patients like Jason Lipkin, a dad and attorney, in an early stage clinical trial at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital.
For those suffering from alopecia it’s the autoimmune disease that causes people to lose their hair nearly seven million suffer from it tj holmes here with the store one man who found new hope after losing nearly all that hair on his body george look it around our audience all this beautiful hair sometime with it to this hair this morning right even the men with
Your beard you put time into your hair it’s a part of your identity and your confidence now imagine losing all of it what that would do to you i met a guy and you’re about to meet him to lost every hair pretty much from head to toe but when i met him had so much hair he just gotten a haircut over the course of six months in 2015 dad and attorney jason lipkin lost
All the hair on his body everywhere i went every time you saw a person that you knew they turned white as a ghost and most people just assume non-cancer but jason wasn’t going through chemotherapy he was diagnosed with alopecia universalis an autoimmune disease that caused his hair to fall out every single hair on my body here is jason today what’s it like to
Have hair again i think the smile says it all it’s amazing i get to feel i feel like myself again his journey started back in 2015 at first it was just a spot on his beard but later hair came out in clumps i’ll never forget it he was showering one day and i can hear him screaming from the shower because the hair started to fall out into his hands his hair eyebrows
Eyelashes all fell out there were times where i would be in court arguing a motion on the record and like a judge would stop me and out of concern and like it would get addressed jason was diagnosed with a severe form of alopecia for which there are few long-term treatments that work how did you see your husband change he just was withdrawn he was he felt hopeless
He wasn’t dying of cancer and this wasn’t you know something that was going to kill him but emotionally the emotional toll was it was a it was just a lot to take this is unbelievable but through dermatologist dr. emma guttman jason got a rare opportunity that changed his life a chance to participate in a clinical trial i’ve seen devastating cases of a parent and
Children it effects their entire life their performance at school interactions was friend it’s amazg the small early stage trial at mount sinai hospital in new york in 2017 where doctors were testing a promising medication called a jak inhibitor having seen patients regrowing hair it’s unbelievable the trial while early and small has helped several participants
Like these regrow hair start taking these two pills and then over time what happens it grows like it like my hair is growing now uncertainty today jason takes his last pills from that clinical trial we’ve been told that the likelihood is that he’s gonna lose it all again at some point i don’t know how long it’ll hold on for now the couple is living in the moment
Staying positive and keeping that hope would you have preferred to have not gone through the experience of having the hair you have now if it’s just gonna fall out and have to go through it all over again this time at least i know it’s not gonna be some doctor saying sorry there’s no hope you know at least i know there’s something out there but that hope might be
A long way off they’re still early in trials have several more to go through before this would ever be available to the public and strahan we did get an update from him just yesterday i was two months ago he says he is starting to get light thinning of the hair in some places so he might have to go through this whole process of losing his hair again but some hope
Out there down the road though well hey there gma fans robin roberts here thanks for checking out our youtube channel lots of great stuff here so go on click the subscribe button right over right over here to get more of awesome videos and content from gma every day anytime we thank you for watching and we’ll see you in the morning on gma
Transcribed from video
New drug could hold promise for alopecia By Good Morning America
