can i treat female pattern hair loss without
minoxidil or spironolactone until recently women suffering from
female pattern hair loss have had limited choices
men who suffer from male pattern hair loss have the option of taking the drug
finasteride this is not an option for women with female pattern hair loss
female pattern hair loss is characterized
by diffuse thinning throughout the whole scalp
since these hairs are so close together hair transplantation is not an ideal
option since the surgery itself can potentially
damage a significant percentage of existing hairs
resulting in little benefit although the drugs
minoxidil and spironolactone are treatment for female pattern hair loss
there is another option which can be very effective
i'll discuss how we treat female pattern hair loss
so women with this condition can thicken their thinning hair
and stimulate the growth of their existing hair follicles
which are not growing this is all done typically without minoxidil
or spironolactone I'm Dr. Amiya Prasad I'm a Board-certified cosmetic surgeon
and Fellowship-trained oculofacial plastic and reconstructive surgeon
I've been in practice in New York City and Long Island for over 25 years
i've been performing hair transplant surgery throughout my career and have
been prescribing a finasteride for male pattern hair loss patients
since 1997 hair transplant surgery can be
frustrating in that in spite of performing
meticulous surgery a certain percentage of hair grafts
just don't grow naturally this reduces patient satisfaction
in an effort to achieve patient satisfaction
in hair transplant surgery that's comparable to the level of satisfaction
my patients experience with my cosmetic surgical procedures
such as facelift and eyelid surgery i began
using a wound healing material called
extracellular matrix by ACell I also used the same material
to optimize healing for incisions such as those used in a
facelift surgery with very impressive results
what i discovered a year after using this material for hair transplant
surgery is that thinning hair that wasn't
transplanted had grown in thicker i spent several
years since around 2011 developing dosing and
customized protocols for the non-surgical treatment of male
and female pattern hair loss the treatment system i developed is
called TrichoStem Hair Regeneration inspired by
over a 99% success rate for my patients in terms of
better hair coverage i built a freestanding center in northern virginia
exclusively for non-surgical hair loss treatment
minoxidil which has been around since the 1980s is
well accepted as a treatment for hair loss
in my experience both men and women who i
see for hair loss find minoxidil to have limited benefit and at the same time
often plain about having scalp irritation
they also complain that their hair gets matted down
making the hair look even thinner the drug spironolactone is a
testosterone blocker occasionally prescribed for the
treatment of female pattern hair loss by doctors like dermatologists in my
experience my patients with female pattern hair loss
have reported no significant or discernible benefit
using spironolactone physiologically women have considerably lower levels of
testosterone compared to men so it's questionable
whether blocking the small amount of
testosterone would have any significant benefit unless
if the testosterone level was unusually high
the incidence of hair loss in women increases with age with
50 percent of women over the age of 50 experiencing hair loss
this does correlate with decreasing estrogen associated with menopause
it's well established that estrogen has a positive effect on hair growth
we've seen this in our practice in patients who are taking
supplemental estrogen we also have a significant number of women younger
than 50 who have earlier onset of female pattern
hair loss or androgenetic alopecia we've also helped a lot of women who
have a condition called polycystic ovarian syndrome or PCOS
as i mentioned earlier i created a system of hair loss treatment called
trichostem hair regeneration the trichostem hair regeneration
treatment involves the application of a wound healing material called
extracellular matrix made by the company ACell and in combination
with PRP or platelet-rich plasma which is derived from your own blood
typically with only one treatment session
TrichoStem Hair Regeneration has helped women
with female pattern hair loss improved their scalp coverage
significantly since 2011 we've helped people from around the world with female
pattern hair loss and have seen improvement in over
99 percent of the patients we have treated
TrichoStem Hair Regeneration is individually customized
based on your gender age of onset of hair loss
degree of hair loss and other variables i developed this system by making
detailed analyses and observations over many years on a wide range of
patients for most people TrichoStem Hair
Regeneration can last three to five years after a single
treatment session some patients with more advanced hair
loss benefit from a second treatment usually 15 to 24 months after the first
to additionally thicken finer hair growth stimulated
by the first treatment as opposed to the conventional
pay per session PRPtreatments currently promoted in the market TrichoStem Hair
Regeneration is a customized treatment plan which
includes the second treatment session when needed and follow-ups at the first
month after treatment and every three to six months for two years
thereafter for our many patients who come from
outside our immediate geographic area we do follow ups through email
skype or facetime currently a lot of medical retailers are
offering PRP injections or PRP+ACell injections
interestingly these all appeared many years after i successfully established
TrichoStem Hair Regeneration unfortunately
these generic treatments being offered require
sessions performed every month to every three months
without any specific strategy for an individual's
hair loss profile in essence with these generic treatments
it doesn't matter if you're a 25 year old male with advanced hair loss
or a 60 year old female with moderate hair loss
the treatment regimens are the same speaking from the perspective of my
experience working with extracellular matrix by
ACell it's clear to me that the PRP+ACell
being offered is not that different from PRP
alone since the treatment intervals are the
same regardless if ACell is added or not
i can say this because one of our first patients who
inspired me to develop TrichoStem Hair Regeneration
had improvement in hair coverage one year
after ACell and PRP was used during a hair transplant so we already
established a way to get at least one year of benefit with only one
treatment i can reasonably conclude that these
practitioners haven't put in the time needed to learn how to use extracellular
matrix by ACell you see using too little extracellular
matrix by ACell in the formulation makes it essentially just plain PRP
it can be argued that by adding the word ACell
is being done to simply justify charging more without
any evidence of a specific benefit in comparison to PRP alone
from first hand experience i can attest to the fact that this acellular matrix
is very difficult to work with although
using too little can have no significant benefit
using too much extracellular matrix in the formulation can
actually cause fairly significant inflammation
this inflammation can induce significant hair shedding
we have a good number of patients who had prp treatments done
elsewhere they came to us because they didn't see
much or any results from just having prp injections alone
and they found having to get multiple injections
into the scalp every month to three months
to be painful expensive inconvenient and unfortunately
ineffective although i've observed some benefit for
hair growth with prp alone i find that PRP scalp injections on its
own yield similar results to using minoxidil
that is hair growth occurs but the growth is not that significant and
cannot be sustained if you stop having continuous treatments
in contrast with TrichoStem Hair Regeneration treatment
results are typically sustained for three to five years
with no more than two treatment sessions 18 months apart on average for our
patients with female pattern hair loss we don't see any need for minoxidil use
afterwards so in conclusion minoxidil and
spironolactone potentially can have some benefit for
women with female pattern hair loss however with over 10 years of clinical
experience treating hundreds of women every year
with TrichoStem Hair Regeneration we now have a
highly effective and long lasting way to manage female pattern hair loss
i hope you found this information helpful thank you for your question