Thank you for your question! You’re 36 years old and you submitted a single photo and you
describe in detail a situation where you were diagnosed with androgenetic alopecia after
biopsy was performed by a dermatologist who said you had miniaturized hairs and that you
had a lot of hair loss after an unfortunate event when your mother passed away. So you
are asking whether to use particular laser device to help you treat your hair loss.
Well, I can certainly give you my perspective. I’m a board certified cosmetic surgeon and
a fellowship trained oculofacial plastic and reconstructive surgeon, practicing in Manhattan
and Long Island for over 20 years. Hair transplant and hair loss has been a big part in my practice
and I’m also the founder of Trichostem™ Hair Regeneration centers. And we’ve developed
a non-surgical alternative to hair loss which is particularly very effective for the treatment
of male or female pattern hair loss also known as androgenetic alopecia. So I can certainly
help you orient yourself in understanding what role different therapies have.
You did mention in your question that you are using minoxidil. In this country, there
is basically for the medical perspective, the use of minoxidil for female pattern hair
loss as well as transplant surgery, there is some perception of value of the use of
low level laser light therapy. However in my experience, I have not found low level
laser light therapy to be any value. We’ve had professional level devices where we sit
patients under this device and have them sit there for prescribed periods of time and this
is long before we developed Hair Regeneration treatment and I was always questioning whether
or not there was value. We didn’t see the hair thickening and we would question whether
or not maybe the laser light therapy was maybe maintaining hair presence. I can tell you,
my colleagues share my opinion and there are of course many colleagues who offer and sell
many of these products and I think they are doing their best to do whatever is possible
to help people with hair loss.
In your situation, you have to also differentiate two entities that you are dealing: one is
pattern hair loss, androgenetic alopecia. This is where hair grows in and then sheds
and then grows in thinner otherwise referred to as hair thinning. So with every growth
cycle, the hair gets thinner and that’s genetic. Also, it has a specific pattern that
is the eventual disappearance of hair. Now that’s different from telogen effluvium
or shock-related hair loss where you had emotional trauma then you lost hair. This is when, if
you learn about the basic growth cycle of hair there is anagen which is the active growing
phase, catagen, the transitional phase and telogen which is resting phase where it sheds
out and the hair follicle remains in the skin waiting to grow back usually 3-4 months. What
happens in stress is significant percentage of hair will go prematurely into the telogen
phase and normally more than 90% of hairs are in the active growing phase, the anagen
phase. So when that happens for someone who has androgenetic alopecia, it often actually
reveals or exposes the presence of hair thinning and many times, people will say that after
this event, their hair just stops growing and what they are actually experiencing is
the combination, like you have, of telogen effluvium with hair thinning.
Now, understanding my position with the laser devices, I can tell you that in our practice,
we’ve developed Hair Regeneration and with Hair Regeneration we are using and a method
system that we’ve developed over the years of clinical practice combining platelet-rich
plasma (PRP) which is derived from your own blood with Acellular matrix or extracellular
matrix that is used on wound healing. This is based on observation we made years ago
that we are trying to help people with hair transplant surgery, thinning hairs actually
became thicker. So we actually developed a protocol based on a variety of a variables
including age, gender, hair loss pattern and etc. that we developed several years of treating
patients who come to us all over the world. We have hundreds and hundreds of patients
a year so we are to adopt a good system in place. Basically, with Hair Regeneration,
we are able to establish that the hair thinning process stops. There is reactivation of hairs
that have not been growing and that’s because the telogen phase is of thinning hair and
actually gets longer and it appears not to grow. And if it does grow, it grows back thinner.
And with the hair that is thinning, it will shed out and actually grow back thicker.
And so with more than 5 years of data, we’ve been able to establish a sustainability of
a single injection. Now we have protocols where we do a second injection in some patients
after one year and it depends a lot on how I customize the treatment because even though
we have a lot of data in a lot of people, we still treat a patient as an individual.
This is maybe an opportunity for you to learn more about this additional treatment. I can
tell you that almost everybody at some point of their journey of treating their hair loss
has, at some point, bought a low level laser light therapy device and these are marketed
very aggressively and I think it is still up to our peers to determine any true clinical
benefit. And I am not going to debate whether or not the study showed benefit but I would
like, as clinician, as a surgeon, I would like to basically see things with my own eyes
and if it is not obvious and significantly improved before and after treatment with the
laser, I think that I’m still not fully convinced. In spite all of that issue, frankly,
we do not need the laser and we are very successful with Hair Regeneration. And even if someone
would need another treatment, with based on our observations, clinically it is sustainable
if someone needed an injection every 3-5 years.
So I think that you can learn more and research about the treatment like ours and also learn
about the true efficacy of low-level laser therapy. Look for a resource where there is
no bias where the person offering it has not been involved in a study or whether or not
it is well received because ultimately there is no harm but you have to see whether it
is worthy investment and the time.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!