Saw palmetto is a popular herbal supplement sometimes recommended for hair growth. However, there are absolutely no reliable studies that have investigated saw palmetto in relation to hair growth. A few of the studies you see on the Internet were done by the companies selling saw palmetto supplement or were done on a small number of people. There is a study in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (August 2002, pages 143-152) that was done on 10 people and the results were lackluster. There is no reliable information you can construe from that kind of research.
There are abundant studies for saw palmetto in relation to its ability to improve benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH). Saw palmetto got its reputation for hair growth inadvertently due to the relationship between BPH and male pattern baldness, both of which are affected by the production of DHT. If saw palmetto could affect DHT, it was only a short stretch to assume that it might be effective in treating male pattern baldness, too. But theory isn’t always good medicine. There is also research suggesting that saw palmetto does not affect DHT and that it exerts some other action that may be the reason for the improvement in BPH symptoms.
Having said all this, for $10 you can get saw palmetto as a supplement and see if it works for you after discussing this option with your physician.
(Sources: Cutis, February 2004, pages 107-114; www. naturaldatabase. com; American Family Physician, March 2003, pages 1281-1283; Urological Research, June 2000, pages 201-209; Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2002, volume 3; Journal of the American Medical Association, November 1998, pages 1604-1609; and www. hairlosstalk. com.)