Month: January 2023

Although there is few questions i have that cannot be answered somewere on this site i seem to have one in which i cannot find an answer. It is stated that the hair loss gene comes from your mothers genes(hence if your mothers father is bald you will be bald.)If this is fact i have a question with a certain situation. If my father started balding early(about the age of 23-24) But my mothers father started around the age of 55-60, what is in store for me? My hairline is as my mother’s father’s was but it is not the same as my fathers, also my hair color and texture is like my mothers fathers. What is your opinion?

Hair loss is genetic, but it does not follow a specific predictable genetic pattern. It has been observed that the hair loss gene seems to favor the mother’s side (about 52%), but this is not always the case. While scientists can say hair loss is genetic, they still have not found the specific gene for hair loss because it probably reflects a series of genes. In addition, carrying the gene does not mean that the gene will be expressed and you need to express the gene to be balding. So when we get smart enough to learn how to control the ‘expression of the gene’ then the solution to hair loss may be at hand.

There is an old joke known in this industry — A bald father with a heavily balding son complains to his wife, “Look what you and your family gave him” (pointing to the son’s hair loss). In our male dominated society, we tend to blame women for every conceivable problem with the children, because we know that as men, we are just perfect.

I hope the sarcasm comes through to the casual reader.

Since they kept on growing for a month after the hair transplant, before the shedding period started, that should mean the grafts survived well, doesn’t it? If it is this way, then I know I have nothing to worry about, but I can’t seem to find any information to confirm this.

The normal state for grafts is that they appear to grow immediately after a hair transplant but are not actually growing because what looks like growth is really the body pushing out the hair from the grafts to their full length, usually between 5-8 mm plus the length of the hair above the skin at the time it was taken. So the apparent length depends on how long the surgeon kept your hair length when he did the FUE. After they shed, they restart growth in sometime between 2-4 months after the shed.

Does hair age?

Of course hair shows the effect of aging and it will often change as we get older. Look at the huge crop of large diameter hairs in the ponytail of a twenty two year old women and think of the meager, thin hair of some 80 year old women. Hair often gets smaller in diameter and fewer in number as we age.

The process of getting finer shafts (or lower densities of the hair) with age occurs insidiously over many years, starting in some people in their early 20s (male and female) and progressively becoming more frequent with each decade. We just notice the changes when we look at an isolated 80 year old in a nursing home and we think ‘Old’. The medical profession calls this type of thinning ‘senile alopecia’ (doctors have to use some Latin to create a medical mystique to it). Most people will notice that their adult hair changes in character as their age advances. This change in character may be from wavy to straight, or from thick gorilla hair to a see through appearance where the scalp can be seen in reasonably bright light (htat may never have been the case in that same person when they were 20). I would suspect that the thinning of hair densities occurs in fully 1/3rd of the adult population (male and female) at some time during their lifetime and I see this process in some men who are in their early 20s, which we now call ‘diffuse unpatterned alopecia’, yet another abuse of the latin language of olden days.

By Drs. Jim Arnold and William Rassman

If you develop it shortly after taking the medication, stop it. If it doesn’t go away, see a doctor

I am considering getting a HT but one things that bother me a lot is the scarring in the back of head. I wear my hair very short now (buzzed with zero guard) and I would like to have the option to do in the future as well. how bad is the scarring with FUE this days? I read on some HT clinics websites that with their method there is hardly any scarring at all. is there any truth to those statements? thanks in advance for any help

The question about shaving your head after an FUE is partly about the scar, small scars are better and less visible, but it is also about how many grafts you get harvested as too many will cause a see-through donor area. In addition to focusing on the donor area, you have to focus on the recipient area asking yourself: “What density will I achieve after my FUE?”. The answer to that question is that you will almost unlikely get anywhere close to your original density so if you shave your had and don’t take advantage of hair length, then your density may be thinner than you would like to see, especially when compared to another part of your head where you didn’t lose hair (a stark difference).

I have had FUE procedure 2 months ago and was thinking of having another for my beard. Was curious how long I’d have to wait before another one, and whether the back of my hair could be used again for my beard. I came across some articles that really concerned me, mainly about most people have a limited amount of grafts they could use in their lifetimes, usually around ~4-6k

Some remarks that I’ve read from doctors on this topic:

You can have many FUE procedures over your life time as long as you keep your total donor hair supply in mind. If your donor hair supply is 6000 grafts You can have six 1000 graft surgeries or three 2000 graft surgeries.

I really don’t understand the science of this works. The hair on my donor area is completely full now after 2 months. Is this in spite of some hair follicles permanently removed, and the full hair is due to remaining follicles after 2k grafts taken from there? I was under the impression that what was taken from the back would grow back. Is this not true?

FUE removes grafts from your permanent zone forever. You have a limit of donor graft supply and a good doctor will measure that limit and should quantify what your total available, lifetime graft supply will be. For many people, large FUE sessions will cause a balding, see-through donor area as shown here: https://baldingblog.com/collection-victim-photos-internet-harvested-depleted-donor-areas/ As you can see, either these men had incompetent operators, or greedy ones who left some of them balding forever in the back of the head. For the advanced balding patterns, strip surgery (called FUT) is a better option as well as for most women expect for those who have very small procedures.

According to clinical studies, finasteride generally works primarily on the vertex, much less well on the midscalp, and not much at all on the front of the head. I’ve seen suggestions that this might be so because the processes that result in frontal hair loss are different than those at work in the crown. (That is, perhaps it’s something other than DHT, or in addition to DHT, that drives hair loss in the frontal and midscalp portions of the head.) Do you think there’s anything to this theory?

From Wikipedia — “in modern science the term ‘theory’, or ‘scientific theory’ is generally understood to refer to a proposed explanation of empirical phenomena, made in a way consistent with scientific method.”

Unfortunately, there really isn’t a scientific theory to explain the difference in hair loss in the frontal region and crown of mens’ scalps. Your hypotheses, which are theories that are not considered to have been satisfactorily tested or proven, may have some merit… but I do not know for sure.

In the end, it is genetics that cause male pattern baldness. That much we know. That theory is solid. At this point, I do not know why DHT (for those men who have the genes) affects mostly the crown. For that matter, I do not know why the back of the scalp in men are always spared from balding. Maybe there are other hormones involved.

From my 27 years in this business and the 20 or so years since Finasteride has been on the market, I have never seen this drug cause hairline recession. I have seen patients develop recession when the drug did not work well as the battle to control hair loss is lost.