Thank you for your question!
You’re asking a question where you want to know how effective is stem cell therapy
when combined with hair transplant? And you described in your question your situation
of being 35 years old, being on finasteride for several years and that you are considering
getting twenty two hundred grafts for the crown, mid scalp, frontal area. And that your
doctor suggested the use of stem cell therapy which would effectively act as fertilizer
for the hair graft surgery. I can certainly give you my perspective.
I’m a board certified cosmetic surgeon and fellowship trained oculofacial plastic and
reconstructive surgeon performing hair transplant and the use of wound healing technology or
stem cell-based technology in my practice and I’ve been in practice for over 20 years.
I’m also the founder of Trichostem™ Hair Regeneration centers which is a non-surgical
alternative to hair transplant based on stem cell-based wound healing technology and I’ll
explain that further. I can certainly give you a lot of perspective on how we’ve developed
what we’ve done with a similar concept when we were doing a lot of hair transplants.
First of all, the unfortunate reality is the term “stem cell therapy” is too broad
a term and it’s not clear in what way, what modality stem cell therapy is being applied
in your situation but I can tell you this scenario on how we came to where we are in
helping people with hair loss similar to yourself. For years, one of the biggest frustrations
with hair transplant was the limitation of the number of grafts you can harvest and the
survivability of the grafts when they are transplanted. Hair transplant is a very labor
intensive procedure. It requires several hours and you are making, for twenty two hundred
grafts, you’re making twenty two hundred openings and on those twenty hundred openings,
you may lose anywhere from 10% to 90% and we’ve seen that scenario play out when people
have had mega sessions who came to us for assistance after they’ve lost a lot of hair.
So we are using a material for wound healing called extracellular matrix and it was with
the goal to help the donor area heal better, to help the grafts survive better and a side-effect
turned out to be that thinning hair actually became thicker. The concept of stem cell has
to be defined. In the way that I’m using it in our practice, is we are using a material
called extracellular matrix which promotes the activation of adult stem cells. These
are stem cells in your own body related to wound healing to create an effect to improve
wound healing.
Now in a case like yours, you’re essentially in a situation where in spite of finasteride,
you are still progressing and that is not unusual. 60% of men will respond to finasteride
but it is well established that finasteride doesn’t stop progression, it does slow it
down. Now in the photos you submitted, it’s clear that you still have existing hair in
the crown or mid scalp area. Now one of the things, now I’m not being critical of your
doctor but one of the things that is often understated in the hair transplant world is
that when you are making those twenty two hundred openings, there is invariably a certain
percentage of native hairs which get lost because those areas that you want to treat
are not bald. There are actually a lot of miniaturized hairs. And with that being understood,
it was a compromise we always made because we knew that those hairs were going to go
anyway.
What I learned in our practice is that when we took someone like yourself and instead
of doing a transplant, developed a treatment called Hair Regeneration where your existing
hair, which is already there, stops thinning and reactivated hairs that are growing and
makes thinning hair become thicker (phone rings..he restarts)
When we see patients like yourself who are in a similar situation where you have a lot
of existing hair that is thinning, when we use this treatment called Hair Regeneration,
we are actually able to restore a certain volume and coverage that in actuality, exceeded
the results of a hair transplant which is quite significant if you think about it. Because
imagine if all those thinning hairs which you’re slowing seeing disappear actually
stopped thinning and actually start grow thicker, then the effect of coverage is far more effective
than transplantation. You see, the ambitious project of twenty two hairs to cover that
area will not provide the density that your hairs already have per square centimeter.
So what we have done in our practice is we treat someone like yourself first with Hair
Regeneration treatment before considering doing a transplant. In fact, we have been
able to prove that after one injection, people have been able to hold on and not have any
evidence of regression for 3-5 years and recently, we have been actually been working further
developing methods where I might do another injection timed somewhere into the second
year to build on top of the results of the first injection. So it has been a remarkable
treatment for people who come to us from all over the world and see significant improvement.
So this is kind of going into the idea of stem cell therapy but it’s your own adult
stem cells without having to do the surgery.
Now, understand that stabilization is a critically important part of your hair loss treatment.
And since you’ve already been using finasteride and in our experience, the combination of
finasteride with Hair Regeneration has been synergistic. There may be an option for you
before moving forward with that surgery in terms of understanding the role of stem cell
therapy. So, it’s kind of where your doctor is suggesting right now is a natural step
in which we have gone through several years ago where we wanted to make the hair transplants
heal better using stem cell therapy. Again, I don’t know exactly what your doctor is
offering so I can’t speak specifically to it but I can tell you from the photos you
submitted that someone like yourself, coming to our practice, would be treated first with
Hair Regeneration.
So learn more about the stem cell therapy. Speak to your doctor about getting the details
of what the stem cell therapy means and what are their expectations. Now, I’m not telling
you not to do the transplant but I’m just saying how our treatment has evolved over
the years, we actually don’t see the need for the majority of patients who come to us
with thinning hair, both men and women, to offer transplantation first but rather address
the hair loss with Hair Regeneration.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!