Hairline Advancement, Do I Need It?
Cost?
Do you think I need it?
I can't wear my hair pulled back in a pony tail.
I always have to part it in the front.
My head still looks disproportionately large.
What can I do?
You're asking about advancement of the hairline and do you need it.
Well, this is a subjected question but I would say that you first have the understanding
of the pattern of your hair in relationship to your family history.
So if you come from a family where people tend to have very high foreheads, then naturally
that's your family's unique characteristic.
But if you feel that your hairline is receding, now
that's a whole different story.
What I would advice is to look into your habits.
What we normally find in women, a lot of them have traction alopecia.
Now, traction alopecia is based on a lot of them wearing pony tails or hairs pulled back
very tightly.
And even some even come to us and said that they actually pulled their hair tightly to
literally lift their brows.
And they did that for many years and eventually, the hairs, because of the traction and pulling,
they became nonviable and their hairline of course receded.
So if you feel that your hairline is receding, you need to investigate why.
Is it because of traction?
Is it because of female pattern hair loss or male pattern hair loss?
Because, even women can have a pattern of hair loss like temporal recession like a male
in terms of male pattern and still have that look.
So even if you are not a man, you can still have male pattern hair loss.
To understand then what to do, women have fewer options if they are truly receding and
all hormonal causes have been eliminated.
Typically, when a patient comes to our practice, we always ask about hormonal problems, medications
and other factors that could be associated with the metabolic causes of hair loss before
we make the diagnosis of a pattern of hair loss.
Now, once you've established that, then a certain percentage of our patients will even
do biopsy to determine if there is other information or scarring.
Assuming all of that is fine and you're still receding, well, I'm going to introduce to
you a concept called hair regeneration.
And in my practice, I'm a multi-specialist cosmetic surgeon and I have been a hair restoration
specialist for over 10 years, in the past 3 years, I have been very focused on a new
technology of hair regeneration.
A material called extracellular matrix which was originally designed for wound healing,
I have been successful in applying a byproduct of your own blood or I should say a fraction
of your own blood called platelet-rich plasma to literally revert the thinning of hair and
restoring volume and thickness to hair that's thinning.
You see, it seems that this wound-healing mechanism helps to reactivate stem cells specifically
cells called progenitor cells which is responsible for the material that the hair is made of
and the activation of the part of the hair called the dermal papilla.
And so, a lot of our patients who have come to us consider transplanting, hairline advancement,
forehead reduction.
We often choose to do a non-surgical procedure and by doing this injection treatment, we
have helped a lot of our patients avoid surgical procedure.
You see, unfortunately a surgical procedure in hair transplantation it's like taking a
slice of time where you can look good at certain amount of time but if you continuously have
thinning hair, it's like you're in a treadmill where in you're moving but you're not going
anywhere.
So what we want to do is to stop the process and reverse it so that even if you chose to
do a transplant, the transplantation would be done with the expectation that the hair
thinning process won't continue at least based on our data supports which is so far a minimum
of 3 years, we inject people.
What the future is depends on the clinical observations that we make over time.
Again, this is a very leading edge material.
To summarize, if you feel like you're receding and you're hair is thinning, if you were to
come to our office, I would actually use a microscope, look at your scalp and try to
evaluate the proportion of normal hairs or terminal hairs compared to the hairs that
are thinning and then make a recommendation about what to do.
If we see a lot of thinning hairs, then the injection is actually a wonderful option to
restore and literally reverse the hair thinning process.
So learn more about your process, your situation and think more about your progression rather
than going for a surgical solution at this time.
Once you've learned about all your options, I'm sure you can make a more informed decision.
I hope that was helpful.
Thank you for your question.