Thank you for your question.
You stated in your question that you have thinning hair and you’re asking, does this
new procedure with Acell and PRP really works.
Well, I can certainly give you some information about this “new procedure”. 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 I’m actually the founder of TrichoStem™ Hair Regeneration Centers
where we perform non-surgical regeneration of hair for people both men and women with
thinning hair using Acell and PRP. So I’ll give you a little bit of understanding of
how we developed our treatment and give you a sense of the benefit.
So to begin with, Acell, this is a material that is a type of extracellular matrix and
what it is, is the material that’s derived from pig bladder that is used for wound healing.
Now the process of the use of Acell was first introduced during hair transplant surgery
and the purpose was to improve the survival of hair grafts and to improve the healing
of the donor area where you harvest the hair. A side-effect that was noted was that thinning
hair occasionally appears to get thicker.
Now this was going back several years and so, at that time, I started to ask a different
set of questions and what I wanted to know was if someone has thinning hair, are we in
fact helping them more by figuring out the best way to deliver Acell, PRP without doing
a hair transplant. In other words, if you had a certain population of hair, chances
are if those hairs got thicker, then conceptually, you will get better coverage than you can
with a hair transplant.
So over several years, me and my team in my practice, we developed a system and a process.
And how do we do that? Well, we looked at dosing, we looked at different types of hair
loss, we looked at different ages, we looked at different patterns and essentially, over
time, developed an algorithm. So we refer to that as Hair Regeneration. Now people come
to us from all over the world to have this treatment. And so from that, we developed
TrichoStem™ Hair Regeneration Centers as our first effort to try to see if we can bring
this process closer to people who can’t get to us.
So right now, there is some confusion but at the same time, I’m very happy about the
growing awareness of the Acell and PRP. When I was first started doing this as a standalone
procedure, I can tell you that we got a lot of resistance both from people who were doing
hair transplants who felt financially threatened by the procedure and as well as consumers
or people who were suspicious about something that works as well as it appears to be illustrated.
So over time, basically, we were able to organically prove with a large volume of patients and
with people coming to us from all over the world, it became difficult to refute the potential
benefits of Acell and PRP.
The challenge that we faced in the development was in proper dosing, delivery and dealing
a lot with the challenges of inflammation as well as shock and hair shedding. So at
this point, we have systems in place. So I can comment to your question that in our hands,
in our practice, it has been extremely successful. Like I said, it is our first line of treatment.
As far as I’m concerned, Hair Regeneration, from what we observed, results from Hair Regeneration
can potentially exceed the volume correction and the volume impact of not just one but
two hair transplant surgeries. Now of course, this is not a perfect procedure because the
limitation is the inventory of existing hair follicles. So if you come to us completely
shiny bald and you want to see hair, well, hair transplant would probably be more or
an appropriate choice. But as long as you have hair, then I feel strongly that even
if you consider hair transplant at some point, stopping the progression of hair loss is critical.
I will actually define what we do with Hair Regeneration or TrichoStem™ Hair Regeneration.
For 99% of men and women with thinning hair, we’re able to stop progression of hair loss.
We are able to reactivate hair that has not been growing because of a prolonged sleeping
phase called the telogen phase as well as induce the shed of thinning hair and then
the growth of thicker hair.
Now as far as the treatment protocol, currently, we are basically able to accomplish 5 years
of correction based on the quantity of data we have for the majority of patients with
one injection. Now on a certain select group, we will reevaluate in 15 months and do another
injection. And so, it is customized. It is customized to the individual. It is not a
one size fits all procedure.
One of the challenges we face in order to scale this procedure is to properly train
other doctors as well as staff in how to implement this procedure. I always tell our patients
who want to learn more about this is that it’s not like dosing like you would in Botox™
or like you would with a filler. You actually have to have an understanding of the biologic
response and it’s a long view. You don’t just get the response immediately. Everyone
has their own type of growth cycles and everyone responds on their own timeline. Sometimes
I compare it to building muscle by going to the gym. Not everyone gets the same result.
Everyone’s program has to be customized to them.
So I think that you have enough information to decide if this is worth pursuing but I
can certainly state from probably the most volume of patients who have been treated with
this treatment in our practice that it is a very promising treatment and certainly,
in light of the current concerns about the long-term sexual side-effects of finasteride,
for men, it has been a great option. And I would say, even more significantly, it has
been a great alternative for women. For men, there’s a certain percentage of men who
can also get transplants but since women have a more diffuse hair loss, it is generally
understood that women are typically not good candidates for hair transplant. But 99% of
the time, they are good candidates for Hair Regeneration.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question.