Category: Hair Loss Causes

Does anyone have experience with AAPE from Prostemics? A patient asked if I do this.

Dr. Brande Wolfe described AAPE as an abbreviation for “Advanced Adipose-derived stem cells Protein Extracts”, is a mixture of refined growth factor proteins that is extracted from human adipose-derived stem cells conditioned media. With its unique protein formula. AAPE is supposed to maximize the revitalizing effects of skin and hair follicles and consists of human proteins created by stem cells, natural composition with multi-function such as anti-wrinkle, antioxidant, whitening, hair re-growth and even wound healing effect. It is interesting that this AAPE product is approved by the US FDA.”

This is not mainstream clinical hair transplant technology.

A long time in coming, Costco announced the following prices for 1mg generic finasteride at $13.00 for a 30 day supply and $23.92 for a 90 day supply. This is really great news for patients and those of you who read our blog (who are taking Propecia).

It seems that there is some secret to actual exposure to sunlight that supplements of Vitamin D does not give you. “In a study of 30,000 Swedish women recruited in 1990 and questioned about their sun-seeking behavior found that the more they had sunbathed, the less likely they were to have died 20 years later. In fact those who did the most sunbathing were hlf as likely to be dead as those who had avoid the sun entirely” said Rishard Weller in New Scientist June 13.

“Other research backs this up. Another Scandinavian study of 40,000 women found that those who went on the most sunbathing holidays were least likely to have died 15 years later…. We have been so distracted by what we see – skin cancer – and have forgotten what maters most. Vitamin D is often used as a euphemism for “healthy sunlight”, but an increasing number of supplementation studies show that the benefits of sunlight cannot all be put down ti it. ”

It also seems that people with pale skin and sun exposure get the worst cancers of the skin such as melanomas, while those with tan skin, get less aggressive skin cancers.

Australian Times:

Jack was 16 when he first noticed that his hairline was receding, as he checked photos his surfing friends had posted on Instagram.

“I’d look at pictures of me when I was 14 or 15, see the hairline and then look at pictures from a year later and say, ‘Oh, that’s changed’,” says Jack, a bashful but athletic high-school student.

Last week Jack, still just 17, underwent hair-transplant surgery to move 3,000 hair follicles from the back of his head to the front to re-create the hairline.

His parents, worried about the impact on his self-confidence, paid dollars 22,000 (pounds 14,000) for the surgery.

Jack is one of thousands of American teenagers turning to surgery for a follicular fix.

“We live in a world where you are judged by the pictures that you take – particularly by the opposite sex,” he said.

“In our age group, most of what you do is going towards appealing to the opposite sex. We’re just fixing something that, by genetics, we just didn’t luck out (on).”

Dr Keith Durante, who is treating Jack, claims that a growing proportion of the 200 hair-transplant procedures he performs in a year in West Islip, New York, are for men in their early twenties or late teens.

Thanks to the barrage of high-resolution pictures on social media, young men are spotting their retreating hairlines and thinning crowns at a much younger age.

Many of the patients Durante treats are diagnosed with clinical depression and are beginning to isolate themselves socially as a result of paranoia about their baldness, he claims.

“You will spend more money on psychiatry bills and medications than you would if you just gave these kids some hair and let them enjoy it for 5 to 10 years,” Durante said. “If they need (the treatment) done again, we can do it.”

Hair-transplant surgeons have been reluctant to treat men until their balding has plateaued, fearing treated hair could end up as an island of fluff if the balding continues. Durante says he can offset the hair-loss process with a mix of treatments.

Nonetheless, some rival surgeons believe it is irresponsible to begin treatment at a young age.

“You’re not creating new hair – you are just moving hair,” said Dr Spencer Kobren, a hair-loss expert.

“You have a finite amount of hair you can utilise. Most experts in the field would say that not only is that medically inappropriate, but it’s unethical.”

Eye lashes are 1/3rd as long as eyes are wide. This is true, not only for most humans of all races, but for 21 other mammal species as well. This is the body’s spectacular engineering to control the air flow around the eye to keep dust out and moisture in, reports Dr. David Hu of the Georgia Institute of Technology this year (Journal of the Royal Society interface). He was able to determine this by computer modeling the air flow around the eye as lash length changed. “By reducing airflow over the corneas, eyelashes create a boundary layer of slow-moving air around the eye”, reports The Economist, February 28, 2015.

The fact that eyelashes are used in flirting, may be an acquired feature of the human species. I apologize to our female readership if I burst their styling and flirtatious bubble.

I found this article of interest. It was in a woman who had extensive leg tattoos and known cervical cancer. A whole-body PET-CT scan revealed what appeared to be cancer spread in the left and right ileac lymph nodes, the team reports and this resulted in a surgical exploration of these lymph nodes which revealed the tattoo pigment in the lymph nodes not cancer. We know that Tattoos spread and in many body tattoos particularly when the tattoo is placed deep in the dermis. This produces lateral spreading to obtain the color backgrounds that the tattooist wants to achieve (Not what we do in scalp micropigmentation). These tattoos however do not stay in the deeper dermis, but move up the body’s lymphatics into the regional lymph nodes. Many of these pigments have heavy metals in them that have a tendency to migrate as the body tries to ‘clean it up’. Some of the temporary tattoos that are used in scalp micropigmentation have a silicon base, and silicon is known to migrate from the placement site to as far as the brain and lungs and if it is silicon based, that is a real risk.

We perform scalp micropigmentation with organic pigments (no silicon or heavy metals) and keep them located to the very upper part of the dermis to minimizes systemic spread. We are very aware that proper placement of the pigment is critical, not only to obtain the discrete ‘dots’ we create that looks like cut hairs, but to keep these ‘dots’ very superficial so that lateral spread is minimized.

Hi Doctor Rassman, how much daily hair loss is normal? some say 50-100, others say 100-150-200 is normal. From your expertise what is normal for an average male with no hairloss.

I believe we wrote about this subject many times over. The average person can loses 0.1% of their total hair count per day as these hairs go into telogen. You must also remember that the person is growing back about the same number of hairs each day. Assuming that the average telogen cycle recurs every 3 years and you have 100,000 total hair count, that calculates to about 100 hairs/day. The numbers are clearly not fixed by nature, so it may vary based upon individual circumstances, genetic patterns, your age and sex.

Drug increases stiffness of infected erythrocytes, favouring their elimination from the blood circulation and reducing transmission to mosquitoes.

“French and British researchers have found a potential further use for sildenafil citrate, the active agent in Viagra. This could help prevent transmission of the mature malaria parasite from humans to mosquitoes. The study has been published in “PLOS One”.”……

The scientists thus sought to stiffen the infected erythrocytes such that the derformed red blood cells which are infected by the parasite may be picked up by the spleen of the human and destroyed. This is an interesting development possibly for those traveling to infected malaria areas, but that may be a stretch on my part.

We continue to see patients who had SMP done elsewhere and found that they continue to be unhappy with the results. The work we have seen reflects an inadequate investment of time on the part of the people doing the process. The patients reported that they had it done over a two day period for a total of maybe 4-6 hours. When that is compared with what we do for a full head treatment, we frequently spend upwards of 20 hours per patient (over 3 sessions). One needs to compare apples to apples, and what we are seeing is grapefruits coming to our office.

The patient we saw today, came in after his SMP pigment almost completely faded. I suspect it is because the pigments used were temporary pigments, and like the patients discussed above, it was a relatively fast job with more widely spaced ‘dots’. The cost to the patient was less almost half of our fee, but then the process had to be repaired and redone again, driving up the total cost of the process. Think twice and be sure to shop the SMP service and absolutely demand that you meet patients that have had it done so that you can tell the different between ‘bull’ and fact.

This young man is enrolled in University of California in San Diego and has a career in Physics in front of him. He is very bright and he is balding already, now only in the crown, but he has early thinning evident in the frontal corners which may follow his father’s pattern of a Class 6 balding pattern.

He said, point blank, that he did not want to go through the four hair transplant surgeries that I did on his dad, even though, he admitted, his dad looked ‘good’. He was dead set against Propecia, for sound, rational reasons and understood clearly, that the decision not to take this drug would inevitably lead him to continue with the progressive balding process he is presently experiencing. He came to this decision having thought hard and long, and after doing considerable research on the subject. “My body has its own clock and my unique genetics and I have known this since I turned puberty. I fully realize that I am ready to go bald, if I must, but I don’t want to keep worrying about it, day in and day out. Now, I live under a base ball hat and I want to go out not worrying about my hair and my visible aging, balding head”

So he came to see me because he decided to have Scalp Micropigmentation. We discussed his changing natural hairline that may disappear with time, and he fully realize that the hairline that we will create with SMP will be permanent and that he was willing to accept the normal recession and adjust his styling, possibly locking in a short hair style (almost shaved look) for the rest of his life. He wanted for us to create a natural shape and configuration of a youthful hairline that he saw on our website on some of our hair transplant patients and on some men who shaved their head and never went bald. I told him that for a while, he will be able to let his hair grow out, until the frontal hairline recedes. He didn’t mind and liked the idea that once he had the SMP done, he would be finished with his hair problem and go on with his career as a physicist and focus on the rest of his life.