Experiencing hair thinning or progressive hair loss can have a significant impact
on your confidence. 95% of hair loss is due to genetic pattern hair loss,
also known as androgenetic alopecia. Although genetic pattern hair loss is hardwired into
your DNA, you don’t have to resign yourself to accepting it without having some options.
As the inventor of the TrichoStem Hair Regeneration System, I can speak to
some basic concepts I inform my patients about during a consultation for hair loss.
Practically speaking, hair grows in 2 phases. The active growth phase called anagen and the
resting phase called telogen. When your hair is thinning fewer hairs are actively growing and
more hairs are in resting phase in comparison to someone who’s not experiencing hair loss.
This means that there is a potential to increase the number of hairs in your scalp
if these hairs in the resting phase were to be reactivated. This applies to both men and
women with androgenetic alopecia. Since 2011, we’ve been performing a nonsurgical
treatment combining acellular matrix with PRP or platelet rich plasma to both reactivate hair
growth and to thicken thinning hair with results sustain for 3-5 years and more.
Does this mean that hair loss can be stopped? No. It means that hair loss can be managed.
By improving your scalp coverage as a function of density and the thickness
of individual hair strands you can feel more confident about your appearance.
We customize treatments based on your gender, age of onset of hair loss,
rate of progression and extent of your hair loss in addition to other medical factors.
For men, there are often potential benefit to use a DHT blocker such as finasteride. For women,
hormone replacement therapy may be considered to help offset loss of estrogen after menopause.
Hair transplant is also an option to help manage your appearance particularly if you
have frontal balding. I help a lot of patients who’ve had hair transplants. They often come
within a few months after their transplant to help optimize their scalp coverage through enhanced
graft healing. In addition, we’ve helped people who’ve had multiple hair transplants years prior.
We’ve observed that even transplanted hair can actually be viable and still not grow.
This may be due to a suboptimal environment in the scalp due to
changes with aging and compromised blood supply from previous surgery.
Once again, although hair loss cannot be stopped, it can be managed through
different options to provide you with maximal coverage for as long as possible.