Hair Loss Treatment During Pregnancy, Breastfeeding, IVF: What Women Need to Know
- Gwen Adey
- Jul 5
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 8
This week, a new review paper caught my eye as I was looking through the latest hair loss research. I was excited to see it because it looks to answer questions that come up again and again:
“I’m trying for a baby. Can I carry on with my hair loss treatment?”
“I’m pregnant now. What happens next?”
“Is there anything I can safely do while I’m breastfeeding?”
“Will IVF affect my treatment?”
These are important questions.
Until now, I’ve usually had to piece the answers together from lots of different papers. This review brings much of the available evidence together in one place, looking at pregnancy, fertility treatment and investigations for Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS), the condition formerly known as Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS).
Before we begin, it’s worth saying that this article is written for women. The considerations for men planning a family are different and deserve a separate discussion, so I’ll come back to those in another article.
This one is personal
This subject is personal for me too.
During my second pregnancy, my hair growth was probably the best it had ever been.
I had loads more than usual and it was thicker and lovely. The world was in lockdown, hairdressers were closed, so my grey roots gradually took over. To my surprise, I quite liked it.
Looking back, I’m glad I enjoyed that time.
I didn’t know it then, but it would probably be the last time I had what I thought of as my own good natural hair.
After my daughter was born, I wasn’t worried at first. I’d experienced postpartum shedding after my first pregnancy and my hair had recovered beautifully. I assumed exactly the same thing would happen again.
So I waited.
Every few weeks I told myself it would turn the corner soon.
Surely next month the shedding would settle.
Surely the regrowth would start.
But it didn’t.
Eventually, I had to accept that this wasn’t simply postpartum shedding anymore.
I needed help.
And I needed treatment.
Perhaps that’s one reason this paper resonated with me so strongly.
Why is this so difficult?
Pregnant women have traditionally been excluded from most clinical drug trials.
That means many medicines simply haven’t been studied well enough for us to know exactly how safe they are during pregnancy.
The authors describe pregnant women as “therapeutic orphans” because so many medications lack robust pregnancy-specific safety data.
The thing is clinicians don’t just have to ask whether a treatment works, they also have to ask whether it’s safe for both mother and baby.
Sometimes the answer is straightforward.
Often it isn’t.
One by one, the options disappear
As I worked my way through the review, I found myself mentally crossing treatments off.
Minoxidil?
No.
Spironolactone?
No.
Many of the treatments routinely used for female pattern hair loss aren’t suitable during pregnancy.
Some of the medications discussed in the review, including hydroxychloroquine and tacrolimus, have reassuring safety data in pregnancy when they’re needed.
However, it’s important to remember what they’re actually used for. These are specialist dermatology medications prescribed for certain autoimmune and scarring forms of alopecia.
They are not treatments for the common hair loss conditions such as androgenetic alopecia or chronic telogen effluvium.
What about PRP?
This was the section I was most interested in.
PRP is fundamentally different from most of the treatments discussed in this review.
It isn’t a drug.
It uses your own blood.
Injectable PRF is even simpler, containing no added pharmaceutical ingredients.
Biologically, it certainly seems plausible that autologous regenerative therapies such as PRP and PRF may well be safe during pregnancy.
But medicine, especially medicine in pregnancy cannot rely on biological plausibility. At the moment, we don’t have good-quality research to recommend PRP or PRF routinely during pregnancy. That uncertainty isn’t evidence of harm. It simply means the studies haven’t yet been done.
The review also points out that pregnancy changes the composition of blood itself, meaning the biological properties of PRP during pregnancy may not be exactly the same as those outside pregnancy.
I hope this research question is answered in the coming years.
One treatment kept standing
As I reached the end of the paper, one treatment kept surviving.
Low-level laser therapy.
It isn’t the most powerful treatment we have for hair loss. But it is drug-free. It is non-invasive.
And it has one of the most reassuring safety profiles during pregnancy.
For women with common hair loss conditions, it may become the mainstay of treatment during pregnancy, breastfeeding and while trying to conceive - not because it’s perfect, but because so many of the alternatives are no longer appropriate.
For myself personally and for patients at our clinic, I choose HairMax laser devices because they have the greatest evidence base.
Alongside low-level laser therapy, identifying and correcting genuine nutritional deficiencies where appropriate may also help support healthy hair and your general health during this stage of life.
Timing matters
One of the biggest messages I took away from this review is that timing matters.
If you’re experiencing postpartum hair loss and you’ve completed your family, you have far more treatment options available.
If you think you may want more children in the future, those options become much more limited because some treatments need to be stopped before pregnancy, while others aren’t recommended during pregnancy or breastfeeding.
If you’re trying for a baby right now, it may be that your hair has to take a back seat for a little while.
I know that’s not easy to hear.
But it doesn’t have to be forever.
Once pregnancy and breastfeeding are behind you, many more treatment options become available again, and together you and your clinician can decide which are most appropriate for you.
PMOS and hair loss
The review also considers women undergoing investigation for Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS), previously known as PCOS.
This is particularly relevant because PMOS is one of the commonest causes of female pattern hair loss.
The authors point out that some hair loss medications can alter hormone levels or mask features of the condition, potentially affecting diagnosis or the interpretation of blood tests. It’s another reminder that treating hair loss never happens in isolation. We have to think about the whole person, not just their hair.
Final thoughts
I always enjoy papers like this.
Not because they answer all my questions.
Because they remind me how many questions we still haven’t answered.
Hair loss doesn’t stop being important because someone becomes pregnant.
If anything, pregnancy can make hair even more emotionally significant.
My hope is that over the next decade we’ll see much more research into regenerative treatments such as PRP and injectable PRF during pregnancy. If future studies show these autologous treatments can be used safely, it could open up entirely new possibilities for women whose hair loss journey overlaps with pregnancy and motherhood.
Until then, honesty matters.
We should be honest about what we know.
Honest about what we don’t.
And help every woman make the best decision she can with the evidence we have today.
Reference
Brinks AL, Lawrence CN, Kearney CA, Rachko G, Bieber AK, DeVore S, Shapiro J, Lo Sicco KI, Majerson D.
Safety and clinical considerations of alopecia therapies during pregnancy, fertility treatment, and polycystic ovary syndrome workup.
International Journal of Women’s Dermatology. 2026;12:e275.
DOI: 10.1097/JW9.0000000000000275
Read the full open-access paper:
Please remember: This article summarises the evidence available at the time of publication. Every woman’s circumstances are different, and treatment decisions should always be made with your own healthcare professional, taking into account your diagnosis, medical history and stage of pregnancy, breastfeeding or fertility treatment.
