I was absent-mindedly running my hand through my hair as I watched TV one evening in January, when an entire clump came away from the scalp in my fingers.
I almost screamed in shock and leapt from my chair to check my reflection in the mirror above the fireplace. When I gently tugged again at my hair to see if I had a serious problem, I detached another clump.
For some reason I continued frantically running my fingers though my hair until I reached a point where all that was coming away was a dozen strands or so in each hand.
I’d clearly developed a condition that is every woman’s nightmare: a dramatic case of hair loss.
At this rate, I thought, I would be completely bald before the week was out.
I had experienced hair loss once before, years ago, when I was pre-menopausal and yet to start taking HRT and so I initially assumed I was suffering from a bad case of ‘grandma hair’.
But as time progressed, I became more concerned about why I was losing my hair.
Back in the previous summer I had embarked on a course of the anti-obesity medication Mounjaro. Was this something to do with my hair loss?
One evening in January, Dorries discovered she had ‘clearly developed a condition that is every woman’s nightmare: a dramatic case of hair loss’. She thought she ‘would be completely bald before the week was out’
There had never been any indication that taking Mounjaro could lead to hair loss and, being a former nurse, I had made sure that I checked out every possible side-effect before injecting myself for the first time.
Apart from scouring the websites of all the major prescribers, I carefully read the NHS guidance on the drugs.
And so I was more than ready to feel nauseous in the early days and fatigued in the longer term.
The online information also warned of the possibility of heartburn, and to expect bouts of diarrhoea – or its complete opposite, constipation.
I experienced every one of these symptoms full on, including being so fatigued at one point that I fainted for the first time in my life – for months, the worst side-effect of me taking Mounjaro was the injured knee I sustained when I fell to the ground.
What I didn’t read about anywhere – and what didn’t appear to have been known at the time – was the distressing possibility of hair loss.
The fact that every other potential side-effect is so well known, written about and discussed, makes the sudden onset of hair loss entirely unexpected and, therefore, shocking. Indeed, it knocked me sideways to such an extent that I told no one about it.
In time, however, I got round to looking for an explanation of why hair loss was not listed as a risk factor. It would seem that even though the weight loss drugs do not directly cause hair loss, the reduction in weight can result in temporary loss of hair.
According to Dorries, manufacturers of weight-loss drugs and the NHS website are still silent on the problem of hair loss as a side-effect of weight loss
Many drugs are tested only on men, with the result that the full side-effects for women are unknown.
It’s an issue I came up against time and time again during my two years as health minister and it prompted me to launch the then government’s women’s health strategy, with one of the objectives being to highlight the fact that women were under-represented in drugs trials.
For generations, women have lived with a health care system designed by men, for men, which has meant that not enough is known about how drugs affect men and women in different ways.
Was resulting hair loss among women taking Mounjaro yet another example of this phenomenon or was it simply down to weight loss when dieting? There was only one thing for it: I booked an appointment with my hairdresser.
It proved to be an inspired decision because, when he became the first person I told about my problem, he revealed that other women had come to him with the same complaint.
And he gave me the advice he had given them: take a course of vitamins designed specifically for menopausal women and massage rosemary oil into the scalp every few days. I also researched the best shampoos and treatments to combat hair loss and came across Philip Kingsley’s Density range of hair treatments.
I bought the lot from Boots and, to this day, I massage the hair serum into my scalp daily. I cannot rate it highly enough.
After spotting an Instagram post in which Davina McCall was extolling the virtues of taking a collagen supplement daily, I bought some and have taken it in my morning coffee every day since.
I also upped the protein in my diet and tried to eat more healthily.
While I threw everything I could lay my hands on at the problem, hair takes a long time to grow back and, when I agreed to do a post-Mounjaro bikini shoot at the age of 68 in this newspaper, I would only do it only if I could wear clip-on hair extensions.
My hair has grown back and, it’s only now that I have come out the other side that I feel able to discuss my hair loss and even write about it.
And I am not alone. Hair loss as a very real side-effect of weight loss has become an increasingly ubiquitous talking point on social media and in online chat rooms.
But the manufacturers of weight-loss drugs and the NHS website are still silent on the problem.
And that’s not good enough. They need to explain the potential side-effects of weight loss on hair so that women are forewarned about what to expect and how to avoid or manage such an obvious and emotionally impactful development.
After all, if this was an issue experienced by men taking the drug, we all know the story would be a very different.
