Is hairline lowering surgery suitable for my age of 20?
Is hair transplantation permanent and safe?
Hello Doctors!
I would like to ask about my hairline!
I just turned 20 y/o last June & stand 173cm.
Some people said I look older than my age and matured & it really bothers me.
Maybe I got this in my mother's side, since my mom has a high hairline and some of my
cousins too.
My receding hairline I think isn't fit in my appearance because of my chubby cheekbone
which also I got from my father!
What should I do about this?
Is lowering hairline surgery or hair transplant safe & suitable for my age?
Thanks
Thank you for your question!
You’re 20 years old and you submitted photos that clearly demonstrate receding of your
hairline and you’re asking if hairline lowering surgery or hair transplant surgery would be
appropriate for you.
Well, I would start by saying that hairline lowering surgery probably is not appropriate.
When you have a hairline that’s thinning and receding then you’ve got a moving target.
And so that we can pretty much remove from the options list.
I’ll discuss to you a little bit about what we do in our practice and help you understand
something about what’s going on with you in context of what you are situation and what
your options are.
In our practice, if someone as young as yourself comes in, we understand that you fall in a
category of a more aggressive early onset of male pattern hair loss.
There is something that we refer to as the rule of decades.
And the rule of decades basically means that for example when you’re 20, 20% contemporaries
have hair loss.
Unfortunately, that means 80% of your contemporaries have lots of hair.
As you hit your 40s or 50s, it becomes close to 50%.
Now, the age of onset and rate of progression is critically important when making a decision
about a surgical treatment for hair loss.
For years, it was always discouraged in the hair transplant community to not transplant
men in their early 20s and the reason is that that there was a mismatch between the amount
of hair you can transplant and the desired result that the young man wants.
When you are in your 20s, you want a lot of volume, you want a lot of hair.
But if you’ve lost a lot of hair, the limited donor area prevents you from getting that
volume that all your contemporaries have.
As men get older and there’s more prevalence of hair, most men are happy to have a definition
of a hairline, coverage of the mid scalp area just kind of like the central part and they’re
fine with that.
But younger men want to have a lot more.
What we do differently these days is we’ve incorporated a method called Hair Regeneration
that we developed in our practice where we treat people with actively thinning hair.
Now, in this country, there are two medications used in treatment of hair loss.
One is finasteride.
This is an oral medication that’s used to inhibit an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase
which interrupts the conversation of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone or DHT.
If you’re doing research about hair loss, you come across DHT all the time.
And it is specific to the hairs that are sensitive to DHT.
In other words, many men who take finasteride especially younger men who have this aggressive
loss, they still may not respond as well to finasteride as to a male who is in their 30s
or 40s and is getting more of a crown slow thinning.
Now that being said, that is an option worth exploring for you.
Unfortunately, at this time, if you do a search on finasteride, you’re going to learn about
the concerns of long term sexual side-effects.
In our practice, any man who comes in who’s in their 20s and 30s usually doesn’t want
to take finasteride at all because of the fear of sexual side effects.
We have men in their 50s and 60s who’ve been taking finasteride since the 90s and
their fine.
So there’s kind of a separation in the perception of the potential issues.
It’s not anyway to minimize the potential side effects and is getting a lot of press
these days.
For us, the solution has been Hair Regeneration.
Combining platelet-rich plasma with a material called extracellular matrix, we have been
successfully been able to develop a formulation, a method of delivery that helps male and female
pattern hair loss also referred to as androgenetic alopecia.
So a lot of our patients come in and we’re able to save a lot of their thinning hair.
Instead that they’re progressing from thinning to thinning to losing, like someone like yourself,
they actually stop thinning and the hair gets thicker.
We have up to 5 years of data to support the longevity and it’s been successful for patients
who come from all over the world.
So someone like yourself comes to our office, that’s exactly what we would recommend.
We would do a full examination, look at your hair with a microscope and identify the thinning
hairs and most likely there’s going to be a large volume of thinning hairs and we would
do the treatment and follow you to 3 months and the results can take to 12 to 18 months.
But when they come in, they can quite dramatic and in many cases, look more natural because
it is your own hair but the volume can be greater than a typical hair transplant.
And that’s remarkable and really makes a big difference.
Many people still do choose to have a hair transplant.
It depends on the degree of progression and how much we are able to restore.
So we usually tell people to not do a transplant first.
We actually tell them do Hair Regeneration, let’s allow the full 18 months to go by
and then see where you’re at.
We actually, at this point, made Hair Regeneration a real viable alternative to hair transplantation.
Not only are we treating men and women who have thinning hair but we are treating men
typically who have had a transplant and several years ago and are thinning and are looking
for an alternative to a second transplant.
They come in, we look at them with a microscope and we see that there are thinning hairs that
actually that we can salvage and we can thicken and they can actually avoid doing a transplant.
Another group of patients are people who have had transplants and while they are trying
to learn about how to help their transplants heal, they come across our information and
they come in to help their transplant’s yield and improve.
In other words, the amount of hair that manages to grow as well as the donor area in terms
of the healing and of course, reverse the thinning hair that is existing so they can
get as much volume as possible from the combination of the transplant and the reversal of hair
thinning.
So it’s been very successful for us and we always encourage people that once you start
noticing thinning, the sooner you come, the better it is because we have more hair to
work with.
We can’t save hairs that’s lost.
We can’t always define hair that is lost.
We’ve been surprised pleasantly by how much hair can come back of people who we thought
can’t get back as much hair as they did.
So I think that you have options but I would say a surgical advancement of the hairline
is not an option that would ideal for you.
I think something that would stabilize your hair thinning, then with proof of that stabilization,
having a rational plan for transplantation for definition is very reasonable.
But understand the limitation.
Remembers, the donor area is very small.
And you think of the baldest man you could think of and you’ll know how narrow that
area is and although, people go outside of the donor area, unfortunately, those hairs
are destined to thin out and that’s a big problem with follicular unit extractions or
FUEs.
They have to be taken in a much wider area than the limited donor area in order to yield
enough grafts for transplantation.
So unfortunately, that’s less than the ideal.
So that’s what makes Hair Regeneration for us a really significant way to help people
with thinning hair before undergoing transplantation someone like yourself.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!