Thank you for your question.
You submitted your question without a photo. And you stated that you had your second PRP
session and that you are scheduled for a third one after a month and you feel that you still
are shedding hair with the same rate as before your first treatment. And you’re asking,
should you go on further.
Well, in light of this question without a photo and further medical history, I will
just give you some guidance as to our experience in our practice with situations similar like
yours for people who come to us. 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. I’m also the founder
of TrichoStem™ Hair Regeneration Centers, a system we developed to help people with
male and female pattern hair loss using PRP and Acellular matrix. And this is a system
that we developed starting about 7 years ago and people come to us from around the world.
So your situation is pretty familiar to me.
First of all, I think it’s important that you have a proper consultation with the doctor
who actually recommended this treatment plan. The point of that being that your doctor’s
experience should be able to guide you as to what your expectations will be. You know,
one of the things that I have observed when patients have come to us and many have come
have had PRP done elsewhere. PRP again is platelet-rich plasma. It’s derived from
your own blood and it’s a concentration of wound healing and growth factors that amongst
other things, it can actually stimulate hair growth. The question is what is the long-term
plan? And what I’ve seen is patients have come to us usually after they’ve gone for
about 4 sessions of PRP separated by a month apart. And for me, it means that PRP is being
done in a way that short-term, may stimulate growth but to what end can you continue doing
this and what happens if you stop? And these are the questions that always should be asked.
Now every doctor will bring their experience to the table but what I’m hearing a lot
from patients coming to us is a lot of doctors don’t have a lot of experience. And they’re
offering it kind of halfheartedly with limited knowledge or limited understanding explanation
but know that, hey, they learned that PRP helps hair loss and now they’re doing it.
The same thing applies to doctors who are offering PRP and Acell. So one of the things
that is really important for you to understand is to first ask your doctor what exactly is
the game plan and also, why are you still having hair shedding.
Now, I’ll share with you our experience with a different approach and this is a procedure
called Hair Regeneration, the company I started, TrichoStem™ Hair Regeneration, evolved from
that. About 7 or so years ago, we were doing hair transplants with the intention of helping
those hair transplants heal better. That means improving the graft survival and improving
the wound healing of the donor area. A very fortunate side-effect was that thinning hair
became thicker and this became true months and months after the transplant and this is
important.
What we did over the course of several years was develop a method of using PRP and Acellular
matrix, an algorithm to help men and women with hair loss, basically androgenetic alopecia
or male or female pattern hair loss. Now we basically have a protocol currently where
we treat at a single point and then we watch our patients every 3 months. And depending
on the type of person we’re treating, we’ll do another treatment at 15 months. Now this
protocol as well as prior protocols have essentially resulted in about a 5-year longevity for the
benefit of the treatment which means the benefits being: stopping progression, inducing the
regrowth of hair that’s not currently growing, inducing the shed of thinning hairs so that
thicker hairs grow in and basically overall, improve the strength and quality of the hair.
Now this stem cell technology that Acellular matrix is the basis for is basically, the
Acellular matrix recruits your body’s stem cells or adult stem cells to essentially,
in a wound healing scenario, literally duplicate the tissue that it is being placed for. So
for example, if it’s placed in skin, it helps heal with skin. It helps muscle heal
with muscle as opposed to scar tissue. Now the mechanism for the hair treatment remains
not fully defined but I suspect that there is a lot of subcellular or cellular interactions
and a lot of biochemical interactions that are resulting in a longevity that doesn’t
require constant injection and that’s a big deal. For patients who come to us from
around the world, it’s impractical for them to even consider coming to us every month.
And this protocol and system we developed has worked out very well.
Now of course, I look at every patient as an individual and I look at their relative
situation. For example, for males, I look at their age of onset, the rate of progression
and what I suspect is a relative DHT sensitivity. With women as well, I look at the different
variables. Every patient is still an individual but this has been our treatment that has worked
out very well and we do frequently see people who have gotten fatigued with going monthly
for PRP treatment.
Now, this doesn’t mean that there’s no benefit to PRP. We use PRP in our practice
for a lot of things. We use it for acne scars, we use it for wrinkles. We use it for under
eye dark circles. We use it for skin texture improvement. We have helped a lot of people
using PRP and I think PRP is a remarkable technology and it is slowly recognized or
reluctantly recognized by the dermatology community and other specialists. So I think
that you need to ask this question to your doctor.
When we see our patients, we follow our patients very closely. We take photos every 3 months.
We review their results. We explain what is typically anticipated. We don’t expect that
one injection and suddenly, everything gets significantly better immediately. There’s
actually a process in which the body responds to our treatment that we have been able to
document and help people understand the trajectory of what to expect. And of course, close follow-up
is extremely important. So I have presented to you some new hopefully useful ideas to
help guide you as to how to make your decision moving forward but I can’t emphasize enough
the dialogue with your doctor about what’s going on and what to anticipate moving forward.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question.