Thank you for your question.
You submitted a question without a photo but you are basically asking a fairly general
question. You are stating that you are in your 40s, you have issues with low self-esteem
and you are considering a hair transplant. But you are asking what are the negatives
of that and how would this be relevant in your 50s to 60s. Well, I can certainly share
with you how I counsel patients in our practice with this very same question.
A little bit of background, I’m a Board-certified cosmetic surgeon and Fellowship-trained oculofacial
plastic and reconstructive surgeon. I have been in practice in Manhattan and Long Island
for over 20 years and hair transplant has been a significant part of my practice and
more importantly, I’m the founder of TrichoStem™ Hair Regeneration Centers. We developed this
method of non-surgical restoration of hair for both men and women with thinning hair
using regenerative technology that we used initially to improve the outcomes of hair
transplants. So this question, from the broad sense and from a strategic sense, should be
dealt with.
So to begin with, you have to think to yourself, how advanced are you in terms of your hair
loss and what is an outcome that you want to see and how long can that outcome last.
So when people come in their 40s, it’s a very different situation if they were to come
in their 20s and 30s. And that being said, I would say, the most single most important
strategy, it’s not about the outcome of the procedure. It’s actually about how to
sustain results.
For so many years of doing transplants, the greatest frustration we have with hair transplant
was to do a great procedure and get a good result that was aesthetically an improvement.
But then, year after year, the person continues to thin. With men, we would try to encourage
the use of Propecia, finasteride, to slow things down. Unfortunately, issues with side-effects
as well as just compliance and responsiveness, only 60% of men respond to Propecia or finasteride.
And so, it lead people, a few years later, to need another transplant and they kept on
thinking that this permanent zone would be able to yield comparable results with the
first transplant. Well, regardless of whether you’re doing an FUT or a strip method or
FUE, you are likely to probably get the best transplant out of your first one if you are
at the level of moderate hair loss patient which is typical when people seek attention.
People don’t seek attention when they’re first slightly thinning. They seek attention
when they’re thinning has advanced to the point where they’re really getting anxious.
So we wanted to try to improve the outcomes of our transplant. We started using something
called Acellular matrix to maximize the healing of the grafts because there’s a certain
loss of the grafts even with excellent surgical technique and all the other variables controlled
for as well as improve the healing of the donor area because the scar was also an issue.
What was discovered incidentally was that thinning hair looked thicker in various patients.
So what I did is I developed a process and system to actually do the treatment without
the transplant. In other words, if you have thinning hair, we have now developed a process
called Hair Regeneration which we’re able to stop the progression of hair loss, reactivate
hairs that are not growing as well as induce the shed of thinning hairs and the growth
of thicker hairs. And when I started to look at the relative comparison of someone getting
a transplant versus someone getting Hair Regeneration, it become apparent to me that there was a
big opportunity for someone who has existing thinning hair to do Hair Regeneration to significantly
improve their hair loss and actually get coverage. And often, what’s the case, it actually
exceeds the results of not one but two transplants. Now that seems like a remarkable statement
to make but if you think about it, if hair thins, let’s say in the crown and outward,
it tends to regrow from the fringe inward and the volume of hair to cover that area
far exceeds any transplant.
That being said, it is my practice that when someone comes who is strongly considering
hair transplant that I advise them to do something to stabilize their hair loss. Again, the donor
area cannot continuously yield more hair. You would eventually run out. It is very common
for us to see patients who come here who have had 3-4 transplants and they’ve got such
thin hair coverage from just transplants because they’ve lost all of their native hair that
it doesn’t look good. Very often, people will criticize the outcomes of hair transplants
and say, “I don’t want to have that pluggy look.” Well, reality is, they didn’t have
a pluggy look while they had hair. It’s only after when they lost their existing hair
that the “hair plugs” or grafts became more apparent.
So I can’t stress to you enough that some strategy, whether it’s taking finasteride,
whether it’s technology like Hair Regeneration, you are already thinking proactively. You’re
thinking about the future, what’s going to be in your 50s and 60s. Well, again, degree
of hair loss, rate of progression are two very important factors to factor in but really,
given that we have so much experience, we’ve been doing this for many years, patients come
to us from all over the world for Hair Regeneration treatment, it has been remarkable for us to
see how people who are ready for transplant will come, have Hair Regeneration and then
ultimately decide that they don’t need a transplant. And it makes a lot of sense when
you just think about when someone chooses to have consultation. They were thinning and
they were thinning for a while but then one day, they decided they’ve lost too much
and they want some kind of help and intervention.
So with Hair Regeneration, we take a lot of these patients and they improve to the point
where they looked the way they looked a few years ago. And at that point, they feel like
they didn’t need attention. So, in many ways, we have actually helped people avoid
a hair transplant. Now, it doesn’t mean that hair transplant is a bad thing. Hair
transplant is a great operation but it has limitations. And until recently, until recent
history, hair transplant became the first procedure of choice because we didn’t have
other alternatives. Now, we can incorporate Hair Regeneration as part of the strategy.
And the reality is, I think that so many men and women would never do a hair transplant
but they wouldn’t mind coming in for a single injection treatment which I didn’t mention
earlier, can last 5 years and longer. And that’s from our own data, our own patients
whom we followed for this much time and we do a lot of these injections every week for
patients who come from all over the world.
So it’s really an interesting time in the narrative of how hair loss can be managed.
If you are already bald, even then, you have to think about how to limit whether it’s
frontal recession or diffuse thinning or just significant advanced hair loss or the Norwood
6. You still want to stabilize whenever you can so that you can go into your 50s and 60s
and look as good as you can.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question.