Looks
Does it grow hair?
Hair counts and hair density, measured rather than photographed.
0
people in trials
1
human studies
1
compounds, animal or cell only
0
trials found nothing
Measured in people
Ranked by how many people, which is a fact about the evidence and not a judgement about the compound. The one at the top is the most studied, which is not the same as the best. Counts are never added across compounds, because the same person can appear in more than one trial.
- no headcount stated1 human study
The single study behind the entire creatine and hair loss claim. It measured a hormone ratio in 20 rugby players over three weeks. It did not measure hair, and it has never been replicated.
Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, 2009 · no headcount in the line
What people using it report
- Hair loss anxiety is widespread in forums and drives many people to stop. The evidence behind it is one unreplicated study that never measured hair.
Measured in animals or cells, not yet in people
These are separated from the trials above rather than ranked against them, because they answer a different question. A result in a rat is a real result and a reason somebody ran the study; it is not a measurement of what happens in you. Where the human work is missing, the reason is usually money rather than failure, and that is set out at the bottom of this page.
- 1 preclinical study
Measured in animals or cells
Increased hair follicle cell activity in culture.
Archives of Pharmacal Research, 2007 · in vitro
What people using these actually report
Uncontrolled self-reports, gathered from clinic write-ups, regulatory complaint records and public forums, and reproduced here as written. They are the best guide on this page to what people actually do, what they expect, and what goes wrong, and they cannot show that anything works, because nobody was measured against a placebo and the people who saw no effect mostly stopped posting. Both halves of that are true at once. The negative reports are kept in for the same reason.
- Hair loss anxiety is widespread in forums and drives many people to stop. The evidence behind it is one unreplicated study that never measured hair.
Sources: Strength training forums and supplement communities. Uncontrolled self-report, included for expectations rather than as evidence.
Why the trial record looks like this
A missing trial is usually a missing sponsor. Nobody runs a nine-figure programme on a molecule they cannot own, so the compounds with the thinnest human records are often the oldest and most freely available ones rather than the weakest. Taking Creatine as the example, because it states the problem most clearly:
Creatine is the rare case on this site where the problem is not a missing trial record. It is that a large, genuinely positive literature has been stretched to cover claims it does not support. The strength evidence is strong enough that creatine would be worth taking on that basis alone. The hypertrophy effect shrinks when you measure the muscle directly instead of inferring it from a whole-body scan, and the cognition claim was tested by a regulator at a manufacturer's own request and failed.
The hair loss story is the mirror image, a claim that circulates as established fact and rests on one 20 person study in rugby players that measured a hormone ratio and never looked at anybody's hair. It has not been replicated in the seventeen years since. Believing it requires the same credulity as believing the overclaims, pointed the other way.
A compound appears here only when a citation on its own page states this outcome and reports a result for it; naming it is not enough. Human, animal and cell work are counted separately and never merged. Participant counts are read from the study lines and deliberately undercount. Nothing here is advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to take or to avoid anything.