Thank you for your question.
You are asking a question whether or not PRP can be effective for male pattern hair loss,
and you state in some of the details of your question that you have noticed that the hair
loss has become a little bit faster.
And you’re asking, can PRP be a standalone treatment for male pattern baldness or is
it a waste of money.
Well I can certainly give you some guidance on this question.
a little bit of background, I’m a board certified cosmetic surgeon and fellowship-trained
ocular facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon.
I’m also the founder of TrichoStem Hair Regeneration centers.
A system that we developed in our practice using PRP with material called extracellular
matrix which I’ll explain more about later, which is a non-surgical solution for male
and female pattern hair loss.
We treat patients from all over the world, so I’ll give you some perspective on how
we do our evaluation and how we make a decision about recommending this particular treatment.
To begin with, understand that in addition to PRP for hair loss, I actually use PRP a
lot in my practice, PRP is Platelet-rich Plasma.
This is a concentration of the wound healing and growth factors necessary when someone
has an injury and in different specialties of medicine starting with oral surgery then
orthopedic surgery and now we’re in aesthetic medicine, PRP has been invaluable in helping
develop basically the things that we love most and need the most when it comes to aesthetics
and this includes improvement of blood supply, improvement of collagen, improvement of tissue
quality.
So in our practice we use PRP for acne scars, for under eye dark circles, for scar treatment.
In the capacity of hair loss I can tell you that historically PRP has been fairly well-established
in helping in wound healing when it comes to hair transplant and it does stimulate hair
growth.
And the question you’re asking is, is it going to slow down hair loss?
And the answer in my opinion and from my experience is no.
I think PRP as a standalone procedure is not adequate to stop hair loss, it’s comparable
in my mind to a treatment like minoxidil.
In our practice we use PRP in combination with a material called extracellular matrix
which initially was intended for improving our outcomes with hair transplant.
When we think of hair transplant, you want the hair grafts to heal better and be more
likely to grow and you want the donor area to heal better so that is not as obvious in
terms of scarring.
Well a side effect was that thinning hairs appeared to get thicker.
Over several years we developed the system to treat hair loss long-term with this treatment
and we call it Hair Regeneration.
What we’re doing is we’ve developed an algorithm where based on gender, type of hair
loss, degree of hair loss and few other factors and variables basically are able to non-surgically
treat thinning hair for both men and women.
In terms of long-term benefit up to this point and this is over many years of doing this,
five years out majority of people who we’ve treated and we have continued to follow, we
follow people very closely, continue to have improvement.
This happens to be beneficial for a lot of people particularly men who were concerned
about long-term sexual side effects from finasteride, the drug with the trade name Propecia.
So we were able to prove from an early stage of development that the injection alone was
able to stop progression, initiate re-growth of hairs that were not growing as well as
induced the shedding of thinning hairs so that thicker hairs will grow in.
And one of the big distinctions between hair regeneration and PRP alone.
With PRP as a standalone treatment, our patients, people who come to us after getting a few
PRP treatments elsewhere, will say that they were going somewhere for monthly visits and
they really just did not enjoy getting their scalps poked at every month and not understanding
when is there will be an endpoint.
So, the understanding that is consistent in what I’m saying in that PRP can induce a
short-term stimulation of hair growth but in terms of long-term benefit.
Hair regeneration has been very successful with a single injection helping people improve
continue to grow hair for more than five years.
We have protocols where in some patients will do a treatment again depending on observations
and particular parameters but even if we do a second injection somewhere around 15 months
or so and then beyond that people continue to do well.
So clearly there is a benefit to PRP but not PRP alone and so I think at this point learn
more about your options including medical, surgical options, as well as PRP and Hair
Regeneration and do something sooner rather than later.
This is another point I do make with a lot of our patients is that the earlier we catch
someone, this is a limitation of our procedure, we need to have viable hair follicles.
If someone comes in practically bald they are in a less advantageous position as someone
who is in the early to middle stages of their hair loss.
Basically the inventory of hair follicles is critically important so we’ve treated
people as young as 17-years-old and we’ve been able to successfully stop aggressive
genetic pattern hair loss.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question.