Am I a candidate hair transplant?
I am a 35 year old female.
I was diagnosed with thyroid disease 3 years ago post partum.
It took over a year to get my dose leveled and hair loss to become normal.
I am now regulated but the hair has not recovered even though it has been over a year.
I would like to pursue hair loss but I am scared of permanent shock loss occurring in
recipient area.
What are your thoughts?
Am I a candidate and how likely is it I will look worse after a transplant than when I
started?
Thank you for your question!
You're 35 years old and you've given a very good history about your issues with hair loss
after pregnancy with thyroid-related issues and you're asking a very simple question about
whether or not you're a candidate for transplant.
Well, the photos you submitted are very good in terms of what a lot of women notice if
they have hair loss.
That is a classic widening of the part.
As a specialist in hair restoration, I'm also going to bring to your attention some other
alternatives to transplantation.
First, I'm going to explain to you as to why I'm very hesitant to transplant female patients.
Female pattern hair loss is more diffuse than male pattern hair loss.
Male pattern hair loss is the recession of the temples and the expanding crown, the bald
spot area and eventually the areas meeting in the middle and progressing.
With women, that hair loss pattern tends to be more diffuse.
Now there's also a challenge in diagnosing the type of hair loss when you have stressors
such as pregnancy.
There's such thing as telogen effluvium or shock loss.
And sometimes, the telogen effluvium, even if the stress is over, you may not get back
all the hair that you lost.
Hormonal issues also play a big role in hair loss for women.
Then comes genetics.
In our practice, one of the things that I found particularly frustrating in transplanting
in women is because there is diffuse thinning, there's also a very small space between the
hairs.
When you look at male pattern hair loss, an area can be smooth and bald and when you placed
the grafts, you're going to skin that doesn't have existing hair.
and even if you place grafts between existing hair, there is often very large gaps.
So you're not shocking the existing hair.
We routinely use a microscope in our examinations with hair and I can tell you when we look
at women's hair that is thinning, the space between the hairs is often very limited.
So what ends up happening in a lot of scenarios with female pattern hair loss treatment with
transplantation is you can place a hair but you may lose one or two hairs at the same
time and you'll end up going no where.
We have been fortunate for the past several years in developing a method of treatment
of female pattern hair loss using something called Hair Regeneration that we created.
This is a treatment using platelet-rich plasma combined with a material called extracellular
matrix.
Now this extracellular matrix is derived from pig bladder and it's originally intended for
wound healing.
It just so happens in an effort of using it as an improvement for hair transplant procedures,
it was noted that hair thinning became improved or I should say thin hairs became thicker.
So what we have been doing is treating male and female pattern hair loss as well as conditions
such as alopecia areata with the Hair Regeneration treatment and essentially, 99% of our female
patients we do the Hair Regeneration treatment rather than a hair transplantation.
The exception if there is a loss of frontal hair line.
If there is a loss of frontal hair line and there is no hair there, then certainly a hair
transplantation makes a lot of sense.
But if there is diffuse thinning, we would first do an evaluation, examination, review
of hormonal status and a proper medical work-up to eliminate all other factors and then in
some cases, we would even do a biopsy in order to insure there is no scarring issue going
on concurrently.
A lot of patients that come to us have already done that groundwork by going to doctors locally
or to major universities to first see what there is diagnosis is.
It is important to also understand that although is material has been very successful for us,
the full understanding as to why it works is still based on clinical data.
That means that we believe that what we're doing through this wound healing mechanism
is restoring some of the native stem cell activity that restores the hair growth hair
cycle such that the thinning hairs become thicker.
In addition, it turns out that the hairs that we are regenerating is actually comes back
darker.
We don't bring back gray hair, it actually comes back darker.
And in so many cases, we already have patients that report that it came back in a particular
way that was present in their teenagers.
So we have been very fortunate and I would ask you to learn more about the extracellular
matrix and Hair Regeneration process so you can learn how this may be a very good alternative.
At the current time, for most of our patients, we only do one treatment and we follow people
at one month, 6 months, 9 months and most of our female patients would start seeing
results staring at 9 months to about a year.
There is synchronization of the hair growth cycles and you just need a critical amount
of time for hair to grow long enough so you can see the difference.
I would advise you, based on your question, to not do the transplant at this time.
But learn more about this Hair Regeneration option and then make a decision of how you
want this to proceed.
There are unfortunately limited options when it comes to female hair loss.
And so, the options really have to be properly evaluated before you make a fully informed
decision.
So I wish you the best of luck, I hope that was helpful and thank you for your question!