Thank you
for your question. You're twenty-six-years-old, you state you have a four year history of
hair loss you're a Norwood four by your description and that you describe a situation where it
appears you have been attempting to help yourself with some homeopathic intervention and that
your concern is that you're getting very fine hairs and you want to know if PRP can boost
your hair growth.
Well I can certainly give you an opinion from my experience, I've been practicing cosmetic
surgeon for over twenty years in Manhattan and long Island and I've been performing hair
transplant surgery for this time and I use PRP a lot in my practice, both for hair and
for cosmetic indications, in addition I'm the founder of Trichostem Hair Regeneration
centers which is a non-surgical alternative to hair transplant for people with thinning
hair, using PRP in addition to a material called Extracellular Matrix that we've developed
over several years.
So I can definitely give you an opinion. Now that being said I want to also just state
for the record that I am not disparaging any doctor who uses PRP alone for the treatment
of hair loss as physicians we do a lot of things based on our own clinical experience
and so I'm sharing with you my clinical experience.
So here we go, with using PRP you have to think about the concept of wound healing and
the reason is that PRP has a lot of benefits that stimulate wound healing by the addition
of new blood vessels the stimulation of collagen and the derivation of PRP in the aesthetic
field we have to thank the oral surgeons who first started using PRP for the improvement
of vascularity in the mandible for dental implants and then the orthopedic surgeons
for using PRP for joint and for tendon and other orthopedic indication.
So when you think about the physiology of hair loss we have to understand a couple things
with male or female pattern hair loss we're dealing with a genetic pattern that programmed
it's hard wired into the genetics for the hair to thin with male pattern hair loss there
is an understanding a well-established understanding of the effects of DHT or Dihydrotestosterone
on susceptible hair that's why the drug Finasteride exists and can be successful and there are
estimation of approximately sixty percent of men will respond but at the same time there
are a lot of men who don't respond.
In our practice we've developed something called Hair Regeneration that we've further
now have created a company called Trichostem to where we found a benefit of using a combination
of a cellular matrix with platelet-rich plasma and with this material we intended to help
the hair transplant patients heal better, we wanted to improve the growth of the grafts
in terms of survivability and viability as well as the donor area in terms of healing
and what was serendipitously discovered was that thinning hair became thicker.
Over several years we have been treating patients and developed a process of protocol and we
follow our patients very closely, what we do is we do a combination of Extracellular
matrix, Platelet-rich plasma and other ingredients that we dose based on an algorithm we developed
in our practice.
When we do this injection we typically do one injection and possibly a second injection
after critical time frame after we follow our patient to maximize the results what we
found that we're able to actually with the right patient who has thinning hair exceed
the results of two hair transplants, because when thinning hair, as you described becomes
thicker the coverage based on the diameter improvement in the hair and the density which
is already there as opposed to a transplant where you are trying to create density is
can be dramatic and can be remarkable.
With 99 percent of male pattern hair loss patients responding favorably to his treatment
we have patients who come from around the world to our offices in Manhattan long Island
and now we're bringing this technology out to people so that we can help more people
with this treatment. So from my experience, when we we're just would use PRP alone I observed
that PRP helped the hair grafts heal better and certainly helps a lot in stimulating skin
quality and tissue quality. But it doesn't seem to have an impact on stopping
the progression of hair loss it may stimulate a short-term burst of growth of existing hair
it may slightly prolong the growth cycle of a thinning hair comparable to Minoxidil, but
I would not say that PRP alone will stop hair loss.
It is very straightforward, we have seen patients who come to us who did PRP injections elsewhere
they would be very dedicated and committed to go every month every month for a couple
years and they still kept on losing hair when we did one Hair Regeneration treatment within
a few months it was observed that their hair got thicker.
So clearly the physiology of hair loss is far more complex than what we understand with
just the genetics and DHT there are certainly other factors that we have serendipitously
been able to leverage to help people stop their progression with hair loss.
So with that being said I think you need to learn more and do some more research, but
I would say to you that PRP alone is not going to be the solution you're looking for.
So learn more about your options and hopefully this is a value to you. So once again, I hope
that was helpful and thank you for your question.