Quality of Life in Patients Living with Andro-gentic Alopecia: A Cross Sectional Observational Study

Alopecia is a chronic dermatological disorder in which people lose some or all of the hair on their head and sometimes on their body as well. It is a chronic inflammatory disease that affects the hair follicles. It is neither life threatening nor painful, though there can be irritation of the skin, as well as physical problems resulting from the loss of eyelashes and eyebrows.This study aim to improve the quality of life and prescription pattern in androgenic alopecia. The goal of the study was to assess the quality of life of subjects living androgenic alopecia and to assess the prescription pattern of subjects with androgenic alopecia.This was a cross sectional observational study. The study was conducted Outpatient department of Dermatology in ESI MC PGIMSR, Rajajinagar. All the subjects (n=36) meeting the inclusion and exclusion criteria were briefed about the purpose of the study and the informed consent was obtained. The subject’s demographic details and responses were collected with the help of a standardized questionnaire. The collected data were entered in Microsoft Excel and appropriate descriptive analysis was performed. It was observed that a majority of the subjects were prescribed with minoxidil 5% (58.33%). On comparing the QOL scores, in each domain it was found that emotion has the highest average while the function has lowest average. scores in subjects of different age groups, it was found that the subjects belonging to the age groups 26-35 groups had high average scores (32.84%) and 36-45 groups had low average scores (28.96%).From this study, we got to know that the quality of life of male gender is affected more rather than female. Minoxidil 5% was most commonly prescribed drug and overall dosage form prescribed were topical agent.