Thank you for your question.
You’re 25-years-old. You submitted several photos showing the top of your scalp and you
state that you had one PRP session and that you’re still dealing with a lot of hair
shedding. And you state that you’re on finasteride, minoxidil, you’re taking a fish oil. And
basically, you have a short list of follow-up questions. First, you’re asking should you
go for a second session. Will a second session help reduce the hair shedding? Will there
be any thickening of the hair after the next session? Will there be any change in the pattern
even though you’ve lost a lot of hair? Certainly, I understand your anxiety with this situation
as a younger person who’s losing hair.
I can certainly give you some guidance as to how I treat patients like yourself who
come to our practice pretty much every day. A little bit of background, I’m a Board-certified
cosmetic surgeon and Fellowship-trained oculofacial plastic and reconstructive surgeon. I have
been in practice in Manhattan and Long Island for over 20 years. I’m also the founder
of TrichoStem™ Hair Regeneration Centers. This is a system we developed as a non-surgical
alternative to hair transplant which ultimately has been also an alternative to the drug finasteride
which I’ll discuss further. And we have patients who come from around the world for
this treatment which has been very successful for people such as yourself.
Just to kind of go over what you have been doing and certainly, it seems you are covering
all bases. You’re doing the maximum medical therapy which is the use of finasteride as
well as minoxidil. Those are the two drugs that can have any effect. And I think it’s
reasonable to stay on these drugs. And the reason I’m saying that when, essentially,
your clinical picture is a younger person who is aggressively losing hair which means
the genetics is fairly aggressive. And although you’ve gotten one PRP injection, you’re
still noticing hair shedding.
I think it’s important for you to understand that PRP stimulates hair growth. It doesn’t
necessarily stop progression and this is probably what you are experiencing.
Now PRP or platelet-rich plasma has a variety of benefits and we use it in our practice
every day for a variety of uses. We use it for dark under eye circles, we use it for
acne scars, we use for it for skin rejuvenation, we use it for fine lines and wrinkles. But
the limitation I’ve seen with PRP as a standalone for hair loss is that it’s basically, again
my experience, short-term burst of growth but it doesn’t stop progression.
And so, in situations like yours, we’ve actually developed a treatment that evolved
out of doing hair transplant. And I’ll explain further. We were using a material called Acellular
matrix to help improve the outcomes of hair transplant. Basically, the challenge with
hair transplant is to make sure that maximum number of grafts survive and that the donor
area heals as well as possible. Well, a serendipitous observation was that thinning hairs became
thicker. And what I did was I decided to focus on developing a system to see if this was
reproducible because it wasn’t necessarily happening to every patient and my question
for myself was can we do this to help people with thinning hair instead of doing a hair
transplant.
Well, it took several years of development and a lot of challenges to overcome, a lot
of setbacks along the way but essentially, we developed a system called Hair Regeneration.
Hair Regeneration does us PRP but we use it in combination in a very specific way for
different types of patients, for male, female, based on age, type of hair loss. And I do
the treatment in a way to deliver the material in way that will actually do several things
which potentially can be a benefit. Basically, stopping the progression of hair loss, reactivating
and re-growing hair that is in a prolonged resting stage as well as inducing the shed
of thinning hairs so that thicker hairs can grow in.
Now we do have 99% of men and women responding to this treatment. There are occasionally
people who do not respond to this treatment. But in the grand scheme of solutions, it has
been a remarkable development in the treatment of hair loss which is why people come to us
from around the world. I think that in a situation like yours, I would say that, if you are unable
to do a treatment like Hair Regeneration, there is possibly some potential benefit to
just following through doing some PRP injections but unfortunately, in my experience, it will
not be a long-term benefit for you. We have found that a lot of people come to us after
going for PRP injections once a month and usually at the 4th month, they get tired of
doing it and they’re not sure if they’re getting any benefit. And you wonder how sustainable
is that.
Hair Regeneration for our patients has been, for the majority, overwhelmingly, has been
one injection that has continued to provide stability for more than 5 years. We customize
every treatment and we’ve incorporated a second injection as part of the treatment
to help strengthen hairs that are very fine that were literally saved from disappearing,
those hairs seems to be responsive in a lot of patients to the second injection usually
done between 15-18 months after the first. We refer to it as the booster injection. But
comparatively speaking, there’s no comparison between this treatment and PRP being done
at a regular basis.
But I would say that the significant and important limitation of our treatment is the inventory,
the inventory of hair that is salvageable. The more hair that you come in with, the more
hair follicles we have to work with, the better the results can be. So we advocate getting
patients who are noticing hair loss as early as possible. Right now, our youngest male
patient is 17 and our youngest female patient is 16. And we have been, like I said, very
successful with this treatment. Basically, for a younger person like yourself, you’re
doing all the right things to try to slow down or stop your progression but I think
that if you want to learn more about a treatment like Hair Regeneration, you might find value
in comparison to just standalone PRP.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question.