1 year post Hair transplant, I have slow growth.
1 yr back had hair transplant of 2250 grafts.
Hair has grown back after shedding but they are not growing in length even after 5 months.
Thank you for your question!
You submitted a photo, a limited photo with a concern that it’s been about one year
since your hair transplant and you’re not seeing significant growth and you stated that
there was some shock loss and so naturally, here you are one year and you’re concerned
about the results.
So although I don’t know exactly the details of your procedure, although you described
the number of grafts you had, clearly, by the photo you submitted, it does not appear
that there is significant amount of growth happening at this time.
So if you haven’t had this discussion with your doctor, I’m going to just go over with
a little bit of what the issues of hair transplantation and how growth can be affected and a little
bit about how we do in our practice that we have applied to try to improve the growth
of our hair transplants and as well as helping people who come to us who had hair transplants
whether it’s recent or in the past several years prior.
Let’s begin with just the basic review of what is involved in a hair transplant and
what happens.
First, hair transplant is basically the movement of genetically resistant hairs.
These are hairs that are at the back of scalp in the limited space called the donor area
that are individually placed in areas where the scalp is losing hair.
So little openings are made and we refer to that as stab incisions and those grafts are
placed individually.
A graft is composed of skin, the hair, the root or the dermal papilla and some of the
tissue that surrounds it.
Now when this is performed, there are two things that happen that are related to what
we call shock loss.
One is, the hair grafts themselves temporarily shed as well as the existing hair in the scalp.
Although hair thinning can be to the point where you barely see any hair, with the microscope
we are able to often see that the hairs that are in the scalp that are balding or where
the hairs thinning actually there are many miniaturized hairs.
Nonetheless, even there are existing hairs, a lot of those hairs go into shock so a transition
period occurs for several months typically after hair transplant where there is no growth.
In the beginning, you are able to see the existing hair and the hair that was transplanted
and you can feel the short little ends of those grafts.
And then comes a period where you don’t know what’s going on and whether or not
you’re going to have some hair growth.
As a general rule of thumb, we help people that at one year, most of grafts have grown
in.
now from my own experience, I can tell you that there are different factors that will
affect the results in one year and one of those factors has to do with the rate of hair
growth.
In our practice, we do a procedure called Hair Regeneration and although it’s not
a transplant, it’s a method that we develop to reverse thinning hair and when we do this
treatment, we follow our patients every 3 months.
And prior to recent history, we actually had assumed following a similar pattern as a hair
transplant model that most people would grow within a year.
We changed that.
Now we see a lot of people grow as far as 18 months.
So in way, we are able to classify people as fast growers, medium growers and slow growers.
We find that people who have very advanced hair loss tend to be slow growers.
And although we can see some early results and improvement, with the Hair Regeneration
treatment, we do see that as far 18 months, people have had hair growth.
We even have example of patients who we did the combination of Hair Regeneration treatment
which is a combination of extracellular matrix with platelet-rich plasma, combined that to
maximize the survivability and the yield of the hair transplant as well as to reverse
the hair thinning concurrently.
We see patients where at 12 months, they appear to have less hair or didn’t even have much
growth at all.
Then we see them again at 18 months and they have robust growth of their thinning hair
as well as their transplant.
Now this is using our method and combines not only the transplant method but also the
Hair Regeneration that we developed.
It is not unusual for people to come us who have had mega sessions and had tremendous
amounts of hair implanted and not have any growth.
People have come here from all over the world who have had these mega session procedures
and I’m not saying that the procedures themselves but factors such as elevated blood pressure
and manipulation of the grafts, you can lose about 90% of the hair grafts.
Now that is not a very encouraging thing to hear when you have a limited donor space and
amount of hairs.
Hopefully that’s not a situation for you.
In your case scenario, we probably just wait and see how you are doing for another 6 months
or so and then try to determine what the yield was actually was.
Something that we are doing that has been a tremendous value to a lot of people who
have recently hair transplants or who have had transplants years ago or thinking about
a second transplant.
As I mentioned earlier, the survivability of grafts is critical of a success of a hair
transplant.
This means, although you may move 2000 or 2200 hair, your yield may be 10%, 20%, 30%
less than what you’ve transplant.
In the popular method of FUE or follicular unit extraction, there is a very high rate
called transaction where the hair follicle actually gets cut and the important part of
the hair doesn’t grow and interestingly, some of those hairs will have enough stem
cells activity present that they can grow but a lot do not so the yield is critically
important.
We have been using Hair Regeneration as a way to help people who have had transplants
done elsewhere who come to us and example that we have seen have come to us 1 months
after their transplant, had Hair Regeneration treatment and as early as 6 to 7 months, had
robust growth of both their existing hair and their transplant hair.
So we certainly have seen that Hair Regeneration has been of value to maximize the healing
process and to accelerate the process where the hair grafts actually grow.
Again, we still have to go back to the basic nature of the individual and the variations
that occur throughout to people.
Understanding again that there are slow growers, medium growers, fast growers, you can at least
consider that as a factor as to why your hair is not growing.
I think that it is very important that you meet with your doctor, discuss the details
of your surgery, have your doctor examine your scalp and to evaluate with a microscope
and see what the situation is.
Moving on, you’re going to have limitations of what your donor area can produce for your
next hair transplant if you’re going to consider it.
This is why a lot of people who have had previous transplant that was successful but continue
to find us but we actually do Hair Regeneration injection to thicken their thinning hair and
for many people, they actually avoid a second transplant.
And that way, they can save the donor area and have that banked for later if they were
ever to need it.
I hope that you were able to learn something about the process of healing from a hair transplant
as well as the details of Hair Regeneration which may be something that you would want
to pursue moving on to the future.
So I wish you the best of luck, I hope that was helpful and thank you for your question!