Thank you for your question.
You submitted a question of a photo of the top of your scalp. And you state that you
are 10 days after undergoing 5200 hair grafts. And you’re looking for some kind of indication
of a successful surgery. And you were advised that you would not get any sense of the true
success of the surgery for at least 6 months. And you are posting a question to see if there
are any other ways to know if there was a successful outcome since 6 months is a long
time to wait.
Well, I can certainly share with you what I have counseled my patients when I was doing
a lot of hair transplant surgeries as well as patients who we treat with non-surgical
solutions in our practice every day.
A little bit of background, I’m a Board-certified cosmetic surgeon and Fellowship-trained oculofacial
plastic and reconstructive surgeon. I have been in practice in Manhattan and Long Island
for over 20 years. I am also the founder of TrichoStem™ Hair Regeneration Centers, a
system we developed that was derived from hair transplant surgery to maximize the outcome
and the success of the surgery using a material called extracellular matrix and platelet-rich
plasma (PRP). And we have been helping people from around the world non-surgically for male
and female pattern hair loss in addition to people who have had undergone hair transplant
done elsewhere.
So as far as the healing process is concerned and the outcome is concerned, you have to
unfortunately deal with the reality that it does take time to see how many of those grafts
that were placed actually grow. In general, I can say that 6 months is kind of optimistic.
You really have to wait about a year and in some people even longer but most of our colleagues
in hair transplant surgery would state that one year is the right time to get a sense
of the full expression of the hair graft as well as the growth of the existing hair. One
of the things that people don't always appreciate is that in addition to the shock loss of the
grafts, there is also shock loss of existing hairs. And it depends on how advanced your
hair loss was at the time of your surgery in terms of the density of existing hair.
Further I would say that we have been able to appreciate a strategic application of our
Hair Regeneration technology for patients who have done transplant elsewhere. Just a
little bit of more detail about Hair Regeneration, this was derived after we were doing a lot
of transplants and we were wanting to see as you do the most optimal outcome which is
the growth of every graft that was placed. Hair transplant as you have experienced is
a very tedious procedure and you want to see every graft grow.
So we used a material called extracellular matrix and platelet-rich plasma (PRP) which
is basically a regenerative medicine technology to help the donor area heal better as well
as the grafts to heal better. Well, a nice side-effect was that thinning hair got thicker.
Further along, we were able to then develop a system to help people with male and female
pattern hair loss who would be not necessarily good hair transplant candidates but were progressively
thinning and used this technology to help people get thicker hair. Basically, what we
were able to do is reactivate hair that is not growing, thicken thinning hair as well
as prolong the lifespan or growth cycle of thinning hair.
Over the course of 7 or 8 years, we also developed a classification system looking at gender,
age, age of onset, rate of progression, degree of progression and other medical factors and
other issues related to previous hair treatment. And we’ve even been able to make even more
distinctions and improvement in the system to help people with their progression of hair
loss.
In addition as I mentioned, we have patients who come from all over the world who will
come to us within the first 3 months of having a hair transplant and we’ve been able to
demonstrate that with the stem cell based technology, we can actually expedite the regrowth
of transplanted hair. Further, we were able to thicken existing thinning hair and essentially
help the healing process. So we’ve been able to do that and I’m not saying that
this is necessarily critical for you to do but it is something that we talk about to
patients who are considering hair transplant. And we describe a scenario where during this
healing process, this stem cell type technology seems to have a way to improve the trajectory
of healing.
But to address your question, you have to basically look at it at stages. You look at
the progress of healing in stages. Wound healing, regardless of the type of surgery, takes about
a year. When we are talking about cosmetic surgery like face lifting surgery or hair
transplant surgery, wound healing takes about a year. You go through 4 different phases.
You go through a hemostatic phase, inflammatory phase, proliferative phase and then remodeling
phase. And all of those phases are part of nature and is part of the process.
Now your doctor can probably suggest to you ways to help you with long-term management
of your hair loss progression. If you had, basically I can infer that if you’ve had
5200 grafts then you probably had fairly extensive hair loss. So you also want to think about
what’s going to go on beyond your growth of your grafts and what’s going to happen
a few years later so you have to think of long-term strategies. This is something that
a lot of people don't appreciate when we do a hair transplant. They think of it as a one-off
procedure and then they expect that they won’t continue to lose hair which is absolutely
not true. Everyone will continue to lose hair. It depends on the individual’s rate of progression.
So it is important for you to at least, by asking this question, learn about options
for prolonging the lifespan of your existing hair, the hairs that were grafted and think
about the long-term management whether it’s the use of pharmaceuticals such as finasteride,
minoxidil, whether it’s regenerative technology such as Hair Regenerative as well as future
transplantation.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question.