Thank you for your question.
You’ve submitted several photos and you're asking about the use of PRP to help with your
hair loss and you describe a little bit about your personal situation.
So, I can certainly give you some guidance on the role of PRP and what solutions are
available to you.
A little bit of background, I'm a Board-certified cosmetic surgeon and a Fellowship-trained
oculofacial plastic and reconstructive surgeon.
I've been in practice for over 20 years in Manhattan and Long Island.
I’m also the founder of TrichoStem® Hair Regeneration Centers.
This is the technology we developed in our practice to non-surgically help people with
hair loss.
I'm using platelet-rich plasma as well as other things that was developed from our application
of this technology for hair transplant surgery.
So a situation like yours is something I'm quite familiar with.
To begin with we have to understand first of all the cause and issue on what’s the
basis for your hair loss.
From the photos you submitted my first thought is that these areas are diminishing of hair
in the temple areas of your scalp.
I think that from my experience is caused by something we call traction alopecia and
this is very common for people who have braided their hair or done very tight types of hairstyles
where the skin was under tension from the hair being pulled very tightly.
Basically with traction alopecia the hair follicle eventually stopped growing because
of the tension traction.
Now in a related type of situation for people with your skin type, I'm assuming you’re
someone of African descent.
We've also seen comparable situations in people who have used hair relaxers and hair relaxers
are basically chemicals that disrupted the bonds in the hair to realign the proteins
in a way that causes straightening.
Unfortunately these relaxers could also cause skin burns and can result in hair loss as
well.
Now, since your situation looks more like traction but in the end there is probably
some overlap in the way we would treat your situation.
So when it comes to PRP a little bit of guidance from my experience.
We use PRP in our practice a lot, we use it every day for a variety of reasons, as a cosmetic
surgeon, as someone who does laser in non-invasive treatments and microdermabrasions and various
other and micro-needling.
Platelet-rich plasma is wonderful, we use it for acne scars, we use it for wrinkles,
we use it for dark under-eye circles, we use it in combination with fillers.
But when it comes to hair, platelet-rich plasma can stimulate hair growth but in my experience
it's not sustainable stimulation of hair growth.
In our practice we use something called Hair regeneration and Hair regeneration is a combination
of platelet rich plasma with a material called extracellular matrix.
Now, we use this mainly for genetic pattern loss, male and female hereditary loss.
I have found it to have a limited value with traction alopecia.
However, when we look at someone, when we do a microscope examination I often will tell
the patient that in order to see what we can maximally get from your scalp, whether there
is any salvageable hair follicles that might be in injured state.
There's value to trying something like Hair Regeneration as opposed to PRP alone, but
to get density to get restore benefit we usually have to do some kind of transplantation and
that's gets tricky because the space that you need hair is a fair amount and so you
would probably need a fairly extensive hair transplant procedure and very often it's necessary
to have more than one.
But I think in a step wise methodical approach you can first you have to do everything to
prevent further traction alopecia that means changing hairstyles and I think the unfortunate
reality is a lot of people are resistant to it because often that’s their look.
And we do a lot to counsel our patients to try to manage that.
Because if you keep putting tension on your hair you will lose more hair.
There have been some patients who actually did this traction maneuver to try to lift
their brows and they lost their hair from that I wouldn't advise that as well, but that
being said I think it's the stepwise approach does make sense, Hair Regeneration technology
to first maximize whatever growth there is and then transplantation done in a way that
makes sense to both you and your physician.
So learn about these options about Hair Regeneration and transplantation and then do some consultations
with doctors who specialize in hair loss treatment and hair transplant and move forward from
there so I hope that was helpful I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question.