Thank you for your question!
You’re 26 years old and you’re asking if platelet-rich plasma (PRP) can help with
some of the various gray hairs that you are noticing in your scalp as well as a concern
you mentioned towards the end of your question about certain areas of hair which might be
thinning because it’s not growing as fast as it had previously. These are very good
question about what platelet-rich plasma (PRP) can do and I can certainly assist you with
this.
I’m a board certified cosmetic surgeon and a fellowship trained oculofacial plastic surgeon.
I’ve been practicing in Manhattan and Long Island for more than 20 years. Hair loss,
hair transplant and management of hair thinning is a very significant part of my practice.
In fact I am the founder of Trichostem™ Hair Regeneration centers where we use platelet-rich
plasma (PRP) with extracellular matrix in a unique system that we’ve developed over
many years to help people with thinning hairs.
So to give you some additional information about platelet-rich plasma (PRP), first let’s
get an understanding of what it really is. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) which was really
described by oral surgeons was intended to help the area where they are placing dental
implants to become more vascular. So they were using a concentration by spinning the
blood of platelet-rich plasma (PRP) to stimulate the body's ability to generate blood supply
by generating new blood vessels and to make the tissue healthier. And so when you think
about it, with platelet-rich plasma (PRP) when you take it out of the blood, you can
place it many different areas to help stimulate a healing process. So orthopedic surgeons
have been using it in physical medicine. We have doctors have been using it for tendon
problems, for cartilage, for inflammation. There is a lot of different applications and
in fact many professional athletes have gone outside the United States to have platelet-rich
plasma (PRP) treatments.
Now that being said, when it comes to hair thinning and graying, what we are talking
about is still a genetic program. And when we first started using platelet-rich plasma
(PRP) and extracellular matrix, we were doing it for the purpose of hair transplant success.
In other words, we wanted the grafts to heal better, we wanted the donor area to heal better
and serendipitously, the thinning hairs actually became thicker.
Now that being said, when I start developing a system of using this combination of platelet-rich
plasma (PRP) with extracellular matrix to treat hair thinning in men and women in a
more consistent way and predictable way, we didn’t notice that a lot of people who had
salt and pepper hair or even a lot of gray hair, a lot of their hair grew back darker.
So of course we are excited of the possibility of using this treatment as a way to also treat
graying hair. Unfortunately, it’s a nice side effect but it is not always a predictable
side effects. Now it has been my observation that if someone has had slow progressive graying
of their hair with their hair thinning and that their hair was darker relatively recently
in the past few years, they seem to get more odds of getting the hair darker. I’ve had
patients who have been gray for many years and whose hair came in darker. At the same
time, I have patients who are gray for many more years and their hair came back just gray
but still thicker.
So Hair Regeneration certainly has value in helping people improve the gray hair but it
is not what we use as an indication. I found that essentially if someone has thinning hair,
if the hair comes back darker well that’s just a great bonus for now. Unless we really
start pursuing this, I think that you can consider treating your thinning areas or beyond
depending on examination with Hair Regeneration and then maybe as a beneficial side effect.
Understanding that when we do Hair Regeneration treatment, we are doing single injection over
this entire scalp, multiple areas per one session and with our over 5 years of data,
more than 99 % of men respond to this treatment as well as 99 % of women. And in fact, we
can actually see a lot of people not need further treatment for 3 to 5 years. Now in
our practice we currently do employ a secondary injection done into the second year on some
selected patients not as a way to keep the treatment going but actually to augment the
benefits of the treatment.
So with that being understood, you can at least put things in perspective and understand
there is a differentiation between platelet-rich plasma (PRP) alone versus platelet-rich plasma
(PRP) in the way we use it with Hair Regeneration. So this is an opportunity for you learn more
about this option. I would not say that platelet-rich plasma (PRP) alone would be of value as a
treatment for graying hair.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!