What are my options to treat my high, broad forehead and receding hairline?
I am a male in my mid-twenties.
I've always had a high, broad forehead but as I have gotten older and began receding
it has increased and I feel like it makes my face out of proportion.
I take propecia and rogaine but I feel rogaine will not fix things.
There is a 9cm space from the lowest hair peak from my eyebrows.
My hair is light brown and fine, but quite thick at the crown and back.
Would I be a good candidate for a hair transplant as it really makes me unhappy?
Thank you for your question!
You’re mid 20s, you submitted a photo and you’re concerned about a receding hairline
and you want to know what to do.
Certainly, this can be very distressing.
Hair loss in your 20s puts you in the minority relative to your contemporaries.
In hair restoration, we have a rule of decades.
In your 20, only 20% of your contemporaries will have hair loss while 80% will have a
lot of hair.
So it’s very natural for you to be concerned about the receding hairline.
It may be fair to assume that this is hair loss.
In fact, there’s a family history and this is your family’s history of male pattern
hair loss where you to tend to recede from the front.
And you may have some thinning in the crown but a lot of times, when people have this
aggressive loss from the front that’s a particular pattern.
So that being said, your first options are still potentially medical options so you should
educated about what the medical options are.
In the United States, the two drugs that are used for male pattern hair loss are finasteride
which is a 1 milligram tablet which is taken daily by prescription and the other is minoxidil.
Minoxidil is a topical solution or foam that is applied nightly.
Finasteride is used based on the concept and understanding that a substance in your blood
called dihydrotestosterone or DHT can cause hair follicles that have a particular susceptibility
to the DHT to thin and to disappear.
So the drug blocks the enzyme called 5-alpha reductase which converts testosterone to dihydrotestosterone.
Now, it has been in my clinical experience that a lot of younger males who have the frontal
receding hair loss tend to not respond very well to finasteride.
It may slow down to small degree the hair loss but a lot of times we have seen who were
taking finasteride religiously and they still lost hair.
Minoxidil is not likely to make a significant difference for you.
It’s a topical treatment that makes thinning hair look a little bit thicker or keep it
in the scalp a little bit longer.
So, it leaves you then with the potential considerations of hair transplantation then
I’ll inform you about something that is probably not heard of and we call it Hair
Regeneration.
In the past several years, we have been in a position where we have committed to helping
our patients with a material derived from pig bladder called extracellular matrix.
And this extracellular matrix was discovered serendipitously to help thicken thinning hair
when it was applied for a wound healing process for hair transplant.
As you may or may not know, hair transplantation is the movement of hair follicles from the
back of the scalp in the area called permanent zone or the donor area.
Now this area is limited but when you do hair transplant, you take hair follicles whether
it’s by a strip method or follicular unit extraction but nonetheless, you’re getting
whole follicles and you are planting them in areas where there’s lacking hair.
Well, when extracellular matrix was used, it actually resulted not only in wound healing
in that area but also thinning hair became thicker.
In our practice, we have developed formulation, method, delivery technique that has helped
people who come to us from all over the world.
What we do is we combine extracellular matrix with platelet-rich plasma.
Platelet-rich plasma is derived from your own blood.
It is a concentration of your own serum platelets which have growth factors which seem to help
the wound healing process and although we don’t exactly why it works, the clinical
data supports its tremendous success.
Thinning hair becomes thicker, progression of hair loss appears to be stopped and it
actually helped a lot of our patients especially younger people, 20s and 30s, who come to us
distressed with their hair loss.
In fact, it has changed how we practice in our office, we traditionally have done a lot
of hair transplantation and what we’ve done is we flipped the approach.
We actually will first, in a majority of people who don’t have a deadline, treat with Hair
Regeneration and restore the hair that was thinning.
We can’t bring back hair that was gone.
But if it’s thinning, we can reverse that thinning and get the hair to be thicker.
And so you may want to learn more about this because if you have this progression of the
receding hairline, it is possible particularly if we look at you at microscope, you will
undergo microscopic examination of the scalp, that you’ll find a lot hair that is thinning.
Hair doesn’t just fall off it just actually goes into a cycle where growth cycles occur
and when the hair is shed, there’s a normal amount of 50 to a hundred hairs that’s shed
per day, when those hairs grow back after the Catagen and telogen phases of hair growth
which is about 3-5 months, those hairs come back thinner.
With our treatment, we have observed that the hair that is shed comes back thicker.
The sustainable of this treatment has been documented for over 5 years so with the handful
of patients consider the injection.
So it seems to be a real tremendous benefit for people, men and women with thinning hair.
So I think that my suggestion for you at this point is, you need to at least proper diagnosis.
This may mean visiting a dermatologist, getting some microscopy done in the top of the scalp
to learn if you are having significant miniaturization of the hairs and learn about the options.
You may want to try taking finasteride first or using minoxidil.
Then I would discourage you from transplantation.
If there’s one thing I did not mention in this question is that you could still lose
hair.
So that’s why people need more transplants is that not only they want more density but
because the hair loss continues.
So when you look at someone who has bad transplants, very often it’s because their hair was fine
with the existing hair with the transplants but once the hair thinned and disappeared,
all that was left was the transplants and that created the pluggy look that everyone
recognizes.
So understanding and investigate your options, medical and Hair Regeneration and pursue whatever
you think is right for you after consultation with qualified physicians.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!