Thank you for your question.
You submitted a question after undergoing hair transplant where you had PRP and you’re
asking how many times per year to have PRP injection to treat hair loss.
Well suddenly I can give you my perspective.
I’m a Board-certified cosmetic surgeon and I’ve been performing hair transplant surgery
for over 20 years.
I’m also the founder of TrichoStem Hair Regeneration Systems which is a technology
we’ve developed to help people with thinning hair both men and women using PRP in combination
with extracellular matrix and other ingredients.
We are actually extremely busy doing that as a non-surgical alternative for transplant,
so we can certainly – and we have a lot of data to support the benefits of this treatment.
That being said, I’ll show you my perspective and in no way would I discourage anybody,
any other physician who believes in the use of PRP for hair loss.
It is something that it has been done a lot in the field.
It’s still a small percentage of doctors who do use PRP for hair loss.
I would say that to understand what PRP does, you can think about how it’s supplied in
other area.
Background of PRP was that it was first introduced by oral surgeons who are using PRP or Platelet-Rich
Plasma to help stimulate blood supply for the placement of dental implants into bone.
Then it move onto the orthopedic field where it’s continually used for joint and tendon
treatment.
In aesthetics, in addition to my practice of treating hair I do cosmetic surgery, so
I do facelift and eyelids and complex eyelid reconstructive surgery.
We use PRP a lot.
We love it for complexion improvement.
We use it for acne scars.
We use it for scar treatment.
There’s definitely a lot of value with the use of PRP.
In my experience, PRP can help such as in your case where it can help to try to transplant
heal better.
Just the way it can assist healing in other areas, but as far as treating thinning hair,
I don’t consider PRP a value on its own as a treatment for thinning hair.
I’ll explain why.
When you get down to the reality of thinning hair for men, there is one factor that we
know about called DHT or Dihydrotestosterone which to the hair susceptible, to the effects
of DHT will thin and that’s the basis for drugs such as Finasteride for blocking DHT.
In our practice when we combined PRP with a cellular matrix, we were actually able to
stop the progression of hair loss and restore a significant amount of thinning hair.
We made thinning hair become thicker.
This treatment has been basically one time treatment with maybe and another treatment
to kind of help boost even further the benefits by doing a treatment in a timed – based
on the individual’s response.
Beyond that, it’s been to show – we have data to show that this one to two injections
can sustain hair growth and improvement for three to five years.
Now, for most people who have PRP treatment from what we understand when they come to
us after being treated elsewhere is they’ll go for injections like once a month.
In practical terms it’s very difficult for someone to sustain that logistically.
Even if they’re really committed after few months they usually don’t feel like they’re
getting that much benefit and then they started looking for alternatives and that’s how
define us.
I think the PRP cannot do what is intended.
It may have let’s say comparable effect to something like Minoxidil.
Minoxidil prolongs the growth cycle of thinning hair.
It is my observation that when you inject PRP then you get some fine small hair growth
and you can maybe prolong the growth cycle a little bit, but I would not say that there
is a good schedule for PRP alone.
I think that from our experience when we use PRP for hair loss, we do our TrichoStem hair
regeneration system to really get the results that we get to the point where we have considerably
decreased the number of hair transplants we do because of how effective this is.
In reality is that most people who seek hair transplants are people with thinning hair.
Somewhat thinning hair comes in, they will often have come in because they reach certain
threshold in which they are uncomfortable.
Once we do this injection and we follow them, we follow very closely, we follow them for
at least 18 months.
Then if we do another injection at some point, we follow them for another 18 months.
We follow them very, very closely.
We document with photos, with microscopy, we look.
We really have a good system in place for that.
When we look at their results, majority of people feel very satisfied and they don’t
go for a transplant.
I would say that you can learn more about hair regeneration and our brand name is TrichoStem
but we also refer to this as hair regeneration which is basically changing whatever is the
instruction that the hair had at least for a specific amount of time where it doesn’t
continue to thin but rather grows thicker.
That has been very successful for us.
Again to summarize, I would not say that there is any ideal schedule for PRP alone because
I don’t think it does much for thinning hair other than may be prolong the growth
cycle of the thinning hair, but it doesn’t stop the progression.
If you have thinning hair and you get PRP, you will still continue to lose hair.
In contrast with hair regeneration, we are seeing dramatic improvement for male pattern
hair loss which is and more than 99% of men who come to us respond, it really works out
very, very well.
I hope that was helpful.
I wish you the best of luck.
Thank you for your question.