Is it safe to have PRP after Hair Transplant surgery, or could it cause the hair to fall
out?
I had hair transplanted surgery since 5 month and doctor told me that I should do prp to
improve the hair transplants.
My question is, is it good?
After I do prp, will my hair grow or will it fall or no?
Thank you for your question!
You’ve had a hair transplant about 5 months ago and you were advised by your doctor to
do PRP to improve the hair growth.
And you’re questioning whether or not it will help or will it make the hair fall out.
Well certainly, I definitely share with you a lot of information about this.
As a background, I’m a board certified cosmetic surgeon practicing in Manhattan and Long Island
for over 20 years.
Hair transplant has been a very big part of my practice but more recently, in the past
several years, platelet-rich plasma (PRP) has really been a tremendous area of benefit
to our patients.
Not only just for hair but also in other areas in the terms of skin, scar, wrinkles treatment
etc. but let’s stay focus on the hair.
We’ve actually developed a treatment called Hair Regeneration.
Hair Regeneration is actually a combination of platelet-rich plasma with Acellular matrix.
We’ve developed this as a standalone treatment for hair thinning.
In fact, we’ve reached a point where we have done so few transplants because people
come to us with thinning hair who want a transplant, we will show them that they can get better
results by doing Hair Regeneration.
Now, if someone is bald and they want hair in hair that is bald, then transplant is the
option.
If hair is thinning, that’s a different story.
Now with that understood, there’s been a tremendous interest in patients who have had
transplant like yourself because they understand especially when they are on the computer and
learning more and more that not all the hair that gets transplanted survives.
With FUEs, it’s not uncommon for 30% of the hairs not to make it and that’s because
of transection.
Not even because of graft take factors.
But when you take further the number of grafts that can potentially heal, you may be down
to 50%.
In addition, one the things that helped us make this decision is that when a hair transplant
is done when hair is thinning, there’s trauma to existing thinning hairs.
It’s collateral loss.
and so patients, who get transplants very often don’t see as much as a dramatic improvement
because the hair that was there that was thin gets traumatized by the incisions made to
place the grafts which is why we don’t do the transplants as a primary procedure.
We actually do the injection as the primary procedure.
We’ve been able to help people who had the transplants.
Ideally, it’s better to come within a month to 3 months but during this healing phase,
there may be an opportunity to help the grafts especially if you have FUEs.
And as a side note, it’s something that you should be aware of if you had FUE is that
FUE grafts are actually harvested, majority of the time when you go beyond a certain number
outside the true permanent donor zone, this is something that people who are doing FUEs
understand.
But basically, they rationalize that in order to do it, they have to get the number of grafts
they need.
But I see it as borrowing from the future.
If you are going to take hairs that are at risk of thinning, then essentially, this hair
is already temporary so you may not have that hair in the future.
So my position is that Hair Regeneration can help protect those hairs as well as existing
hair to thicken those hairs in a combined way.
Now Hair Regeneration may need to be repeated.
We don’t know that yet because we have up to 5 years of data.
But the majority of volume and the numbers we see are so high is really more in the past
3 years.
So, with that being said, I think that PRP on its own can certainly be helpful but I
think that the Hair Regeneration method is actually considerably more effective.
So it has the PRP but it has the technology and we have the data certainly to support
it.
So you have an opportunity to try to save your existing hair as well as maximize the
survivability of the grafts even though at 5 months, there is a big question mark there
because there’s a critical period where the graft has to take otherwise it’s not
salvageable that time frame may already be gone but you can’t be sure.
And there may be an opportunity to help you bottom line have more hair.
So learn about this technology and I wish you the best of luck, I hope that was helpful.
Thank you for your question!