It appears that you had too many FUE grafts for the donor density that you had. Usually the typical donor area of a Caucasian can tolerate 3600 FUE grafts. Look at the web-reference here: https://newhair.com/resources/#tab-id-4
2019-08-05 04:12:502019-03-26 18:14:18What happened to my donor area? I have 4400 FUE grafts taken from it.
Assuming price is not an issue, what are the hair restoration procedures/companies that actually work? (It’s one thing to drop 20 grand and get results, it’s quite another for expensive snake oil).
What we do in hair transplants really work. The other day, I saw a man who had 2000 grafts about 14 years ago and he looked absolutely normal with no signs of balding. His pre-op pictures from oh-so-many years ago showed his Class 3A balding pattern clearly. I looked closely at this man’s hairline now and could not see any hint of surgery, even though I knew what was done.
I can only speak for my own practice and the work we do. You can and should research other clinics on the web, but always remember to meet with patients that had surgery with the doctor you choose. Photos are one thing, but seeing the hair in person is much better. We hold monthly open house events so potential patients can meet patients in person. Most doctors don’t do events like that, but you should ask to meet their patients nonetheless.
2011-01-17 12:44:582011-01-14 09:45:36What Hair Restoration Procedures Actually Work?
I can only afford to have my bald patches of my hairline transplanted (FUE) so no other areas of hair will be near. Will the shock loss only affect the donor follicles? or does all of your head hair fall out?
While price/cost is a factor for any cosmetic surgery, it should not dictate the surgery itself. Having cosmetic surgery is not like shopping for the cheapest loaf of bread, laundry detergent, or shoes.
When shock loss occurs, it may be the result of the anesthesia given to numb the head for the transplant and may cover a large area of the scalp, not just the area where the grafts are placed. The mechanical impact of the transplant may not be the cause of shock hair loss. You also have to look at the big picture. We call this the Master Plan. Surgery must be placed along your hair loss timeline and it will be progressive. In other words, you can’t just transplant hair to the small bald patches and expect that to solve your problem, as the balding process is regional. What if you lose more hair around the transplant and behind it as your balding continues? A good doctor should give you insight on your worst case scenario and plan for such consequences. After all, you don’t want to have small patches of transplanted hair scattered around your bald scalp in the years down the line “IF” you were to go bald.
To answer your question in further detail, shock loss is a concern… and while it may not happen, it is a risk. I have addressed your question with the assumption that you have genetic male pattern baldness and not just a patch of bald scalp (which is very rare in genetic balding). Either way, you need a Master Plan created with a doctor (not just me on the Internet) who is willing to look at your hair loss problem as a long term process.
For the follicular unit extraction (FUE), you need to understand it does not work to fill in the scalp balding areas like a patchwork quilt. Do not let the cost of FUE be the primary reason in your decision making process as to what to do and where to put the hair. It is better to be bald than be disfigured with a half-ass surgery.
2009-10-13 15:36:572009-10-13 18:57:27What Hair Can Shock Loss Effect? — and the Cost of Hair Transplant Surgery
Diffuse thinning is overused. Some men will develop generalized thinning in their pattern of balding. When this happens, I would expect the thinning to continue until some pattern actually appears; however, if one intercedes with drugs like finasteride, these men might reverse the thinning (Miniaturization) or freeze it where it is for some time. There is another condition called Age-Related Thinning, which is a term that reflects that all of the hair on the head will change its diameter uniformly. This commonly occurs in men and women over 50 and is more frequent as one ages; however, I have seen this in many young men who had coarse hair in their youth, then the hair caliber reduced to something less than coarse hair. These men reach out to me and think they are balding, but maybe not.
When hair looks thin either density is low (number of hairs) or thickness of the hair decreases (miniaturized hairs reduce thickness as they eventually just become thread-like and disappear).
2020-02-18 02:21:202020-09-26 09:22:25What does it mean if I’ve lost hair density due to excess hair loss?
Hi, i’ve been on Propecia for 10-12 months now, and I would say that it has slowed it down maybe 90-95%.
However there’s something that i’ve been wondering for a while now. If the rate of loss AFTER one has been on Propecia for this long was still quite fast *even though it would be a lot better than not being on it at all*, would this indicate:
1) That without Propecia, the hair loss would have been very aggressive?
2) That the person has not been very receptive to the drug.
3) Both.I’ve always wondered, what does a less than average reaction to the drug tell us?
The answer to your three questions is Yes, Yes, and Yes — all are possible.
There is no guarantee that Propecia will work. We see better results with the drug on young men with more relatively short term hair loss. This is a drug that is known to be effective at slowing down, stopping or reversing the hair loss, but what that means is clearly uncertain. Here’s stats from the official Propecia website’s FAQ:
A 5-year clinical study demonstrated the effectiveness of PROPECIA.
What’s more, in the first year of the study, 86% (587 out of 679) of men on PROPECIA maintained hair or increased the number of visible hairs vs 42% (282 out of 672) on placebo.
2007-02-20 14:34:072007-02-20 12:17:02What Does A Poor Reaction to Propecia Tell Us?
Having read a number of postings and messages concerning transplants, the question arose as to what percentage of the transplants actually survive and grow. If, say, 25% of the transplants do not grow, does a typical doctor deal with the situation by trying more transplants? Or is the patient stuck with having paid for something he did not get?
“…in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” – Benjamin Franklin, 1788
Typically, the success or growth rate of a hair transplant surgery should be in the low to mid ninety percentile, although there may be variability with different clinics. Furthermore, the success of a hair transplant surgery is dependent not only on the doctor, but also on the transplant team and technical staff. That is why the reputation of the entire medical group is just as important as the surgeon. If you feel your hair transplant was not within the acceptable range for survival or it did not meet your expectations, you should meet with your surgeon and address your concerns. On the few cases where yields were less than ideal in our hands, we offered additional transplants at no charge to the patients.
Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) has been in vogue with hair transplantation surgeons in recent years. It is an elegant approach where one follicular unit is taken from a patient’s donor area, one at a time. There are no scalpels or the traditional linear scar. An FUE procedure requires a special 0.7 to 1 mm diameter tool that is used to harvest each hair follicle. All incisions and cuts leave a scar, but an FUE scar is barely visible to the naked eye because each FUE scar shrinks to less than 0.5mm.
There are many variables that contribute to the success or failure of an FUE. As one can imagine, harvesting a single hair follicle one at a time can be extremely tedious and fatiguing to the surgeon if he/she had to do it several hundred times for each procedure. More importantly, negotiating a 0.7 to 1 mm diameter tool to perfectly encompass a hair follicle is technically challenging even under magnification and requires a very steady hand and much experience doing it. Of course, one might ask how a doctor gets that experience and what the cost is to the patients from which that experience comes from.
There are also uncontrollable patient dependent physiologic variables as well, including:
All the above variables contribute to what is called a transection rate. A transection of a hair follicle means that a portion or even the entire hair follicle was cut along its body and could be damaged, which may jeopardize its viability. A complete transected hair follicle will not grow hair when it is implanted.
A “successful†extraction of one hair follicle with the current FUE technique is a very relative term. To better illustrate this point we must understand the anatomy of a follicular unit with respect to the transection rate. One follicular unit can be a group of one, two, three, or four hairs. One patient may have a predominance of two-hair-grouped follicles and the other four-hair-grouped follicles. For example, when a surgeon extracts a four-hair-grouped follicle with an FUE technique and transects half the follicle, only two hairs will grow and the remaining two may be killed off, lost in never-never land. The way some doctors count, this is widely considered a successful FUE effort (not by me, of course), because this means only 50% of hair was harvested and 50% is lost forever! To make matters worse, the patients may be fully charged ($$) for that follicle even with the transection as long a one hair is viable (a shady process to say the least). What is even worse than that is that in a complete transection, that follicle is likely dead forever and even if the doctor did not charge for the complete transaction (as he/she should not charge for it) it would be considered by me to be negative value, reducing the person’s donor hair forever. One may argue that acceptable transection rate for a “successful†FUE is 10% or less, but this is not advertised and most patients (the consumers) do not have a clear understanding of this fact. Nothing in real life is 100%. Even the traditional hair transplant surgery with the donor strip incision has a 2 to 5% transection rate. From a historical point of view, it is interesting to note that New Hair Institute (NHI) was well aware of the possibility of transection rates in excess of 10% as early as 1997 before FUE was in vogue and four years prior to the landmark article published by Rassman, et. al. In conjunction with Dr. Jae Pak (with his mechanical engineering background) the two designed and built a prototype computerized video Follicular Extraction (FLEX) device which was patented by Dr. William Rassman (U.S. Patent 6,572,625). Even that device did not achieve did not consistently achieve the ideal ‘less than 10% transection’ in all patients and FUE can not match the 2 to 5% transection rate of the traditional donor strip incision. The transection rate by our NHI surgeons are still well within the 10% range for FUE and we make no pretenses that it is better than that routinely. Because of inherent limitations of FUE and uncontrollable patient variations, any claims of transection rate of less than 10% should be viewed as highly suspect. The automated process covered by the patent technology (above) is not commercially available… yet!
With the current state of technology, a surgeon may perfect his FUE technique, but the inherent patient variability will keep the FUE transection rate higher than the traditional donor strip incision technique. An informed patient should know the risks and benefits of any surgical procedure. The FUE procedure with its virtually non detectable scarring is an attractive alternative to the traditional donor strip incision and may be good when the amount of hair needed is small because the balding area being treated is not great, but its inherent transection potential may be a deterrent for the very bald patients who want the most hair possible from their donor site.
More information on the FUE technique:
Another set of photos with at least three problems: The donor area was over-harvested, (2) the hair was placed in the wrong direction, and (3) the hair was distributed abnormally. This surgery was done by someone who didn’t know what they were doing. You judge for yourself. What would you do if this was your new look? I would suggest that some of the recipient sites be removed with FUE and then re-implanted, and the donor area be treated with Scalp Micropigmentation
This type of work is almost criminal. The personal side for this man must be an emotional nightmare.
