Am I an eligible candidate for a hair transplant? (photos)

Candidate for possible hair transplantation or Fleming-Mayer Flap. With hair transplants and the Fleming Mayer flap I have found that there is no other treatment other than the finasteride to restore hair. You need to see a very experienced surgeon and wait until your total hair loss is established before beginning.

If you have genetic male pattern hair loss, you may be a candidate. A doctor needs to examine you first to make sure you are a surgery candidate with good donor hair. The examination may find that you may be at an increased risk of further hair loss and the surgery may actually make the you look WORSE or require more surgery.

You also have to understand that hair transplant surgery is not a cure and that they will continue to have further hair loss of non-transplanted hairs. You need to have realistic goals and understand what is possible and what is not possible with surgery.

You are someone who has the manifestations of male pattern
hair loss. The onset of your male pattern hair loss has been early in your life
and it is progressing very fast. Those two factors are very important in your
decision about undergoing transplant. From a pharmaceutical perspective, there
are only two drugs that are used and approved for male pattern hair loss: minoxidil
(Rogaine)and finasteride (Propecia). Finasteride is a drug that is used to
block an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase which converts testosterone to
dihydrotestosterone. Dihydrotestosterone
has been identified as a factor to cause susceptible hair follicles to become
thinner. Hair thinning doesn’t mean that existing hair goes from thick to thin.
Rather, during the normal growth cycle as the hair is shed, the hair that comes
back is thinner.



Finasteride has been shown to help people with male pattern
hair loss reverse the thinning process, but there are some limitations to the
use of finasteride that you should also be aware of. From my clinical
experience, I have been prescribing finasteride since 1997 and 1998 when it was
first approved. Younger males who have aggressive hair loss typically don’t
respond as well as males who are in their mid to late 30s who are starting to
have a slow ad progressive expansion of the bald spot area. Even on those
medications, people still do progress. There has also been a concern about the
long-term sexual side effects. Interestingly in our practice, we have patients
who have been taking finasteride for 20 years and they are fine and even
patients in their 50s who are coming in for prescription renewals. At the same
time, we have patients who are coming in their 20s and 30s who won’t take
finasteride because of its side effects.



When you first noticed hair loss you’ve already lost 50% of
your hair. The rule of the thumb for hair loss is the Rule of Decades - in your
20s, about 20% of your contemporaries have hair loss. That means 80% of your
contemporaries have lots of hair. As you get to your 40s and 50s, 40 to 50% of
men have significant hair loss. I’ve seen so many patients who got hair
transplants in their 20s who continue to lose hair because they were not able to
take medical treatment like Propecia. What are left in their scalp are the
transplanted hair.



When I first trained in hair transplant surgery over 20 years
ago, I learned from my teachers to avoid doing transplants on younger males
like you. Men in their 20s who are losing hair, with a rapid rate of loss, combined
with the unexpected results, are unfortunately
too many unfavorable variables. Unfortunately in the modern world, with
aggressive internet advertising and television commercials, medical procedures
are sold and overhyped. You are only shown the benefits and given very
compelling testimonials that make you want their products. However, the reality
is that the area where the transplants are taken from called the permanent zone
or the donor area is very limited. That limited area is at the back of the
scalp where the hair won’t fall out. In hair transplant surgery, the strategy
is to take those hairs physically as units and place them in areas in the
scalp.



In my practice, I developed Hair Regeneration which is a
method and a procedure that combines a material called extracellular matrix
which is derived from pig bladder and originally designed for wound healing, with
platelet-rich plasma - a byproduct of your own blood that has growth factors.
Platelet-rich plasma is commonly used to help hair loss but on its own, it
doesn’t reverse hair thinning. We reverse hair thinning with our Hair
Regeneration treatment. This is something that we have developed for several
years and we can boast close to a 100% success rate for male pattern hair loss.
This is a onetime injection and literally reverses the thinning of hair and thickens
the hair.



There is a lot that is yet to be understood about the causes
of hair loss as well as the ways to reverse hair loss. For 30 years, several
biotech companies have tried to get some kind of solution and for my
perspective, this use of extracellular matrix, which happens to be an
accidental discovery, has resulted in greater benefit to patients with hair
loss than the work that hundreds of millions of dollars has been invested in
the goal of hair cloning or trying to grow hair in the lab and implant those
hairs. I would love for this stuff to materialize because it would give one
more tool to help surgeons like me to help people like you. At this time, the
material we are using is only FDA approved for wound healing. It isn’t approved
specifically for hair loss but as a surgeon and physician, it is common to have
off label use of materials as long as it is clinically appropriate.



I would recommend Hair Regeneration as a treatment for you. We
follow our patients very closely and see people at one month, 3 months and even
up to 2-3 years. Once a patient is in our practice, the door is always open. I
would just like to remind you to be mindful of the limitations and expectations
of a hair transplant procedure and learn about this extracellular matrix
technology and Hair Regeneration and see if you could find a provider that
would be right for you. I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck,
and thank you for your question.