Getting hair transplant while hair is thinning ? (photos)

You can have surgery now and add transplanted hairs to your existing hairs and enjoy the additive results.  Eventually your native (non-transplanted hairs) will fall out and you 'll be left with the transplanted hairs.  You can wait until you are bald and add transplanted hairs to the bald areas.  Over time the results will be the same.The decision to have the surgery is yours as well as the timing.  

Hair
grows in cycles. The first stage is called anagen which is the active growing
phase. Catagen is when hair rests while telogen is when it sheds out. When hair
comes back in a person with male or female pattern hair loss, the hair comes
back thinner.



Before
even considering a transplant, it’s very important to understand what the
limitations of a transplant are. Many men make hasty decisions to have a hair
transplant because they’re so desperate to fix the situation about their
appearance. Hair loss has a tremendous impact for a lot of men on their
self-confidence. Even though the doctor may tell them that hair transplant does
not stop hair loss progression and more than one hair transplant may be
required, they still just want to go ahead with the procedure. Unfortunately,
hair loss is limited by the mismatch between the amount of donor hair available from the back of the
scalp called the permanent zone and the amount you need to cover in the front.
Everyone assumes that 1500 to 2500 grafts are a lot hairs, but a full head of
hair has about a hundred thousand hairs. By the time someone notices hair loss,
they’ve already lost half their hair.



In our
practice, our goal is to try to save the existing hairs as thinning hairs are
still salvageable. One way to approach this is medical therapy and that’s
taking oral finasteride (brand name Propecia). This is a drug that stops an enzyme
called 5-alpha reductase from converting testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT).
Hairs that are genetically sensitive to DHT will cause progression of thinning.
If DHT is lowered, it will slow down the progression of thinning hair. The
problem is that not everyone responds to finasteride. At the current time,
there is also concern about the long-term sexual side effects tied to finasteride,
so most of the men that come to our practice refuse to take finasteride.



Over the
past several years, we’ve developed a treatment called Hair Regeneration. We
have been successful at reversing hair thinning to the point where the results
actually exceed the results of hair transplantation. The treatment thickens the
hairs that are actively thinning. This would give better coverage than one
could ever have with transplanted hairs. The Hair Regeneration procedure is a
combination of extracellular matrix used for wound healing combined with
platelet-rich plasma. This is derived from your blood and acts as a catalyst to
activate the stem cells necessary for the repair process of the hair follicles
to restore hair to a thickening process. With 3-5 years of data, we have
hundreds of patients coming from all over the world for this treatment. We have
close to a 100% success rate with men, and discourage them from having a hair
transplant as a primary procedure. Without the necessity of taking a pill like
finasteride daily and without the necessity of surgery, we manage to get a
remarkable response. It’s a onetime injection for most patients. There are some
people who’ve had a secondary injection depending on how much hair we are able
to bring back and the degree of relative thinness of those hairs that we have
brought back. We do see benefit of doing a secondary injection with people who
are more advanced.



Hair
Regeneration depends on how advanced a patient is. In our practice, we have
many patients who have really impressed us. Even when they are advanced in
terms of their degree of hair loss, they have been able to grow a lot of hair
back. However, for someone who is Norwood 7 where they are shiny bald for a
long time, it is difficult to treat that. We can save the dying but we can’t
bring back the dead. So don’t wait until all your hair has fallen out, you can
do something now to reverse the hair thinning process. I hope that was helpful,
I wish you the best of luck, and thank you for your question.



This personalized
video answer to your question is posted on RealSelf and on YouTube. To provide
you with a personal and expert response, we use the image(s) you submitted on
RealSelf in the video, but with respect to your privacy, we only show the body
feature in question so you are not personally identifiable. If you prefer not
to have your video question visible on YouTube, please contact us.

 Your hair loss pattern is established and there is no point in waiting since you have baldness already. You should investigate not only hair transplants but also the Fleming-Mayer flap surgery which has many advantages over  hair transplantation. Instead of putting in hairs like blades of grass it replaces your hair loss with large section of your own dense hair.