PRP for hair treatment?
I am a 29-year-female with androgenic alopecia.
Is PRP real or a waste of money?
Thank you for your question!
You’re a 29-year-old female with androgenetic alopecia and you’re asking is PRP real or
a waste of money.
Well, I’ll give you a little bit of background.
I’m a board certified cosmetic surgeon.
I’ve been performing hair transplant for many years.
I’ve been in practice for over 20 years and I do use PRP a lot in my practice and
I’ve developed a treatment that is PRP based or I should say PRP is part of that treatment
called Hair Regeneration.
Now if you’re saying you have androgenetic alopecia, I would work on the assumption you
had a biopsy confirming this as opposed to clinical examination because it’s unusual
for a woman to have androgenetic alopecia.
As far as PRP for female pattern hair loss, I would say that PRP is no effective on its
own.
PRP can cause short term growth and we’ve observed that for years.
We even used PRP before we developed Hair Regeneration to assist growth.
We’ve been using PRP in all other areas of the body.
We use it in the face, we use it under the eyes for wrinkles, for dark circles, for pigmentation.
It’s very useful but for hair thinning, that’s what androgenic alopecia is.
I would not say that PRP is that effective.
In fact, we have patients who come to us who had PRP done for their scalp for hair loss
and basically, they were going in for monthly treatments PRP injections and they weren’t
seeing dramatic improvement.
They were not seeing any improvement.
And so what we do is something very different.
We combine PRP with Acellular matrix and we term this Hair Regeneration.
In fact, we started a company called Trichostem® Hair Regeneration with the mission of bringing
this technology closer to people.
We have patients who come from all over the world for this treatment.
Now this treatment for male pattern hair loss comes close to a 100% success rate in terms
of very verifiable, measurable improvements in the hair thinning in terms of reversal
and thickening of hair.
More than 80% of female pattern hair loss, we see improvement.
So I think that your question about PRP is that unfortunately up to a point and what
we’re doing is very much fairly ahead of the curve because the gold standard for treatment
for hair loss has always been medications.
And for women, it was just basically minoxidil.
For men, it was finasteride and minoxidil and then there was transplantation.
There was nothing in the middle.
So Hair Regeneration, what we’ve developed, has turn out to be quite an impressive tool
to help people.
And when we do this treatment, we do one injection.
We’ll follow our patients every 3 months to observe the regrowth and for most women,
it takes about 9-12 months to see an improvement.
It has to do with the physiology of hair growth but we watch our patients very closely and
we follow our patients up to 18 months.
There are some patients where we’ll do a second injection on so we’ve been able to
establish that this treatment can actually built upon.
So it’s been an exciting time.
So again, to answer your question, you’ve already heard, I think there’s limited value.
I wouldn’t say it’s a waste but I think it’s a limited value PRP alone but in a
context of what we do with Hair Regeneration, it’s been quite impressive.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!