JAAD study tracks racial differences in frontal fibrosing alopecia

A 10-year single-center retrospective cohort study examining racial differences in frontal fibrosing alopecia (FFA) was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, Volume 95, Issue 5, in November 2026. The paper comes from Simona A. Alomary, Nicole J. Baker, Haya Alkiswani, Nicholas Schell, Temitayo Ogunleye and Susan C. Taylor.

That author group matters. Susan C. Taylor and Temitayo Ogunleye, both at the University of Pennsylvania, have built much of the field's Skin of Color dermatology evidence base. FFA — a scarring lymphocytic alopecia that erodes the frontal hairline and, in many patients, the eyebrows — has long shown reported differences in prevalence, presentation and severity across racial groups. Most of that signal, though, has come from small series and registry snapshots rather than a decade of structured single-institution data.

This is a retrospective design, so readers should hold the usual caveats. Ten years of consecutive charts at one center gives granularity that multi-site registries often lack, and it invites granular comparison of presentation patterns by race. But single-center cohorts reflect that center's referral base, and chart review inherits documentation bias — especially for a condition whose early signs, like subtle frontal recession or eyebrow thinning, are easy to under-record.

What does this change for clinicians?

For now, the answer is about where to look, not what to prescribe. If you run a hair loss clinic with a diverse patient population, the study offers a decade-long reference point for how FFA expresses across racial groups — useful when counseling patients about expected patterns, monitoring intervals and the limits of current data. No new PASI-style scoring endpoint, no therapeutic arm, no device parameter is at issue here. This is descriptive epidemiology doing unglamorous groundwork.

The gap it fills is real. FFA research has historically skewed toward white postmenopausal women, leaving clinicians who serve Black, Hispanic and Asian patients to extrapolate. A named, dated, single-center cohort from a Skin of Color research group directly targets that extrapolation problem, whatever the specific distribution the data show.

What we know — and don't — from the citation

The published metadata confirms the essentials:

• Journal: JAAD, Volume 95, Issue 5, November 2026
• Design: 10-year single-center retrospective cohort
• Focus: racial differences in frontal fibrosing alopecia
• Authors: Alomary, Baker, Alkiswani, Schell, Ogunleye, Taylor

Full findings — cohort size, racial breakdown, severity grading, and any differences in age of onset or eyebrow involvement — sit behind the article itself. We are not reprising results we have not read.

Worth watching: if this cohort confirms racial variation in presentation or severity, expect follow-up work on whether current FFA screening habits and treatment-response data generalize — a question every hair clinic will eventually have to answer.