Q 3.
What Makes Individual Differences in Response to Minoxidil?
What makes the difference in the efficacy of minoxidil treatment?
What is the reason of individual differences?
A 3.
Minoxidil is a prodrug, and it has no pharmacological action on hair follicles. Minoxidil itself doesn’t increase hair thickness.
Minoxidil is changed to minoxidil sulfate by particular enzyme at the hair follicles. The name of the enzyme is minoxidil sulfotransferase.
Minoxidil sulfate is an active form of minoxidil. It has an action to increase hair thickness.
There is an individual difference in the sulfate action of minoxidil sulfotransferase at the hair follicles. People have different enzyme activities.
If you have strong enzyme activity of minoxidil sulfotransferase, your hair follicles will produce a lot of minoxidil sulfate. It will result in thickening of hair and satisfactory effects on hair regrowth by the treatment with minoxidil.
On the contrary, if you have only weak enzyme activity of minoxidil sulfotransferase, your hair follicle will produce only a small amount of minoxidil sulfate even from the same amount of minoxidil. It will result in insufficient effect without remarkable change of hair thickness.
