Thank you for your question. You’re 26 years old and you state in your question that you
underwent hair transplant with 26 hundred graphs approximately one month prior. You
started smoking a month after transplant 3-4 cigarettes and you state you are unable to
quit. You want to know will your smoking have any effect on the graphs.
Well, I can certainly share with you my perspective. I’m a board certified cosmetic surgeon and
fellowship trained oculofacial plastic and reconstructive surgeon. I’ve been performing
hair transplant in Manhattan and Long Island for over 20 years in practice. I’m also
the founder of Trichostem™ Hair Regeneration centers, a non-surgical treatment that we
developed as an alternative with people who have thinning hair both men and women to hair
transplant so we have a non-surgical solution as well as this surgical treatment that we
provide in our practice.
So I’m going to share with you my perspective about how I manage people who come for hair
transplant surgery. So let’s talk at first if you are in a situation where at only 26
years old, you lost a lot of hair and you needed hair transplant. Well clearly you have
a relatively early onset. You have relatively aggressive progression. So in your situation,
you chose to undergo hair transplant surgery. Now in the absence of being aware of you using
anything like finasteride or minoxidil or availing yourself to platelet-rich plasma
(PRP) or treatment like Hair Regeneration which I will describe in more details momentarily.
You have to understand what are the unfortunate realities and limits of hair transplant surgery.
Number one, you have limited donor area which is truly your lifetime donor area. This is
an area that in the baldest man you’ve ever seen is that narrow band of hair that doesn’t
go away that is called genetically resisted hair follicles. These are the follicles that
move from the back of the scalp typically to the front of the scalp to help frame the
face.
So you got 26,000 grafts so that’s 26,000 hairs that are anywhere from 1 to 4 hair follicular
unit that we’ll move towards the desired area. Now the challenge with hair transplant
is that although you may move 26,000 grafts, do 26,000 graphs usually completely survive
100%? The answer is no. There is anywhere from 10% loss or in cases of FUEs or Follicular
Unit Extraction, automatically there is 30% because there is transection, different topic,
as well as a variability in the survivability of grafts. We’ve had patients who come to
us for assistance who had mega sessions who lost 90% of their grafts.
Hair Regeneration was actually developed out of the use of wound healing material called
extracellular matrix to help number one, the donor area which is the harvesting site of
the hair heal better and number two, to have the grafts heal better. So, although the scalp
is very vascular and certainly has a rich blood supply, you still have very many variables
that can affect the long term growth of hair. In fact, when we first used the Hair Regeneration
treatment, we were using it to help the grafts heal better as well as to strengthen existing
hair because what we found was that thinning hairs actually became thicker. At this point,
we actually use Hair Regeneration as a separate independent treatment without transplant where
we help people with thinning hair avoid the transplant and actually make that thinning
hair become thicker and it has been very successful and can last up to 5 years.
Now that being sad you can understand what a physician’s perspective is regarding smoking.
Smoking is one of the worst things you can do in your body. Inhalation of cigarette smoke
causes the inhalation of carbon monoxide which literally chokes of blood supply to all your
cells. Usually as a practicing doctor/surgeon for so many years, I can look at people and
I can usually tell if they are smokers. They age faster, their skin looks terrible, they
don’t look good. They unfortunately, the nicotine addiction drives their ongoing continuous
dependence on cigarette smoke. So it is not unusual for person to go from 3 to 4 cigarettes
like you are to a pack a day to two packs a day. So I would discourage you from continuous
smoking for the benefit of your hair grafts. In addition, smoking generates what’s called
free radicals and these free radicals in your blood cause tremendous cellular destruction.
Now, anyone can rationalize that 3 to 4 cigarettes isn’t going to do much harm but it’s certainly
not going to do any good and remember you have a situation where the odds, you haven’t
used extracellular matrix and you may not use every type of wound healing technology
to help the transplant because that’s not the way everybody does it. And at the same
time, you have to understand that you are depleting a limited resource so you want to
do everything you can to ensure survivability. So my recommendation is don’t smoke. Do
what you can to get off the cigarettes. Your hair loss will progress unless you do something
to stabilize the hair loss process whether it is finasteride, whether Hair Regeneration.
Whatever it is, you’re going to need to maximize the benefit of this graphs.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!