Don’t kid yourself. 18 year old men with recession continue to bald over time with more recession and often hair loss elsewhere, like thinning and possible loss in the crown.  You can ignore it and that is fine, but the balding can not be reversed once it is set in. Some men of your age can reverse it or stop it with the drug finasteride. But I would not expect any major breakthrough coming down the pike in the next 10-15 years. I stay on-top of the research and most of all of the advances in hair research and when some great breakthrough occurs, it will take years to get it through the FDA once it is proved which in itself will take many years to prove. I am sorry if I sound harsh, but I am just bringing you a view of reality.

My doctor told me that my hair loss was caused by Vitamin D deficiency a year ago. Since then I have been taking Vitamin D but the thinning hair I have did not get better.

A vitamin D deficiency can definitely cause hair loss. Treating it can stop the progression but it may not reverse it.  You might have genetic hair loss as well and if you are a female you might have many other causes of hair loss which are discussed in this post from a previous baldingblog question posed back in 2009 which I outlined the approach a woman should do when they have hair loss:  https://baldingblog.com/2009/03/13/woman-with-handfuls-of-hair-that-come-out-every-morning/

Can I get back my original hair density?  I have attached a picture.

To get and keep the original density for an area that large would require an extra-ordinary hair donor density present in less than 1% of the Caucasian population. But getting hair transplants to LOOK LIKE a full head of hair is more than reasonable, something you can see in one of our monthly open house events where such patients will show off their hair transplant results. We have developed techniques that can accomplish this over the years.  I have many such patients on our web page to see, some of which are shown below. As you are in Los Angeles, you should try to come to one of our open house events and meet these people because “What you see is what you will get”.  Now with that said, I will show you a man that did get back his original density because he had a donor supply that was extra-ordinarily high below

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I had a very famous celebrity who had a hair transplant with me which he loved. When he came back to see me, he asked if I would transplant his crown because he hated his flat crown. He envied people with a nice rounded head.  So at his suggestion, I transplanted his thinning crown and after about a year when the hair grew out to a good length, he visited me to show me what happened to his flat head.  It was GONE, or at least no one could see it under the bushy hair that was placed to life the hair high above his flat crown. His hair eventually turned white and when he performed on the Vegas Strip, people from the audience would always ask him: “Is that hair all yours?”. “Of course its my hair”, he responded and it was his transplanted hair that was his and my secret.

I have been taking finasteride once a day since January, 2016. The first 2 months I had no improvement. I also have had no side from finasteride. A few months ago I found that I started losing more hair again, just like before I started taking the finasteride 1 year ago. Now it is getting much worse that when I started the drug a year ago. My question is:  What is causing this new loss and what can I do about it?

 

Genetic balding in young men often responds to finasteride by stopping, slowing or reversing the hair loss. But genetic balding is not a steady state as your genes and hormones which cause the balding goes in ‘stop and start’ cycles and even the drug finasteride might not be powerful enough to stop it.  That is why I recommend always seeing a doctor who can help you with this problem. Adding minoxidil works but not when it impacts the entire front, top and crown area.

The pictures below reflect a very beautiful top model who had a hairline transplant in the past that she did not like. The previous hair transplant surgeon did not understand the differences between male hairlines and female hairlines, nor the need to put very fine hairs in the leading edge of the hairline. This surgery was done yesterday and the patient came in today for a hair wash, something we offer everyone to all of our patient 7 days/week. A clean hair transplant without crusting means no evidence surgery in just a few days and I would expect that this patient will have no redness present in a couple of more days. Notice the concave appearance so typical for a proper female hairline. She agreed to let me share these pictures with our baldingblog readership.

As you may know, Dr. Pak and I are the patent holder inventor of two core technologies of the hair transplant robot, inventing it in 1998 and getting patents issued on them in 2006. We also hold a patent on the implanter used by Neograft so i am very familiar with this technology, originally invented by Dr. Pascal Boudjema of Paris France in the late 1990s. I am also the modern day inventor of the FUE procedure, doing these FUE procedures longer than anyone in the world, dating back to 1996 (see: newhair.com/procedures/fue/fue-artas-robot-robotic-fue-surgery/). I published the first article on FUE in 2002 and presented FUE to over 600 physician at the International Society for Hair Transplant Surgeons and gave out a DVD to each of them, and then the rest is history. The reason I patented the robot was because too many doctors failed to perform FUE successfully after I introduced the original FUE article, which is somewhat the case today. The ARTAS Robot leveled the playing field as far as doing successful extractions for FUE which for many doctors who had a problem performing manual FUE with good predictability, was a godsend. We hold now 17 US patents on various hair technologies with three more are pending. We routinely publish all of our advances in medical journals and medical textbooks (see: https://newhair.com/about/doctors/rassman/).

These three technologies all work well at performing FUE in the hands of an experienced surgeon. The ARTAS Robot is different in that all of the decision for FUE such as angle of the ‘attack’ of the drill, the depth of the two drills (sharp and dull) and the distribution of the extractions, are all computerized. In addition, the Robot has the advantage of only extracting the grafts with the most hairs because that is a programming task.  For the experienced surgeons, such high hair graft identification is routine and now the Robot can also do it.  Speed is important for FUE as the longer the grafts are out of the body, the potential worse the survival.  The Robot is a bit slower than the manual system in experienced hands.

Some newer punch designs, I believe, have improved the quality of the extracted grafts. These new ‘trumpet’ punches only recently appeared on the market. These punches were designed independently by Drs. Umar and Devoire and have a unique design which, now that we are using them, shows superior graft quality.  Graft quality with FUE has always been a problem since I pioneered the procedure in 1996. I redesigned punches continuously to find the best punch in my hands and only recently moved to the new ‘trumpet’ punches which we now are using daily.

It is very important to remember that the FUE component of the procedure is just one part of a large process and good quality control system must be put into place by the doctor to get the best results possible. Be wary of doctors who delegate the FUE process to independent ‘teams-for-hire’ where the technicians actually perform all of the surgery and anesthesia. The risk of death from inappropriate use of anesthetics is a real risk in such situations.  When comparing FUE with traditional strip surgery on a consistent quality basis, the Strip Surgery always wins for producing consistent 100% high quality grafts.  The use of the ‘trumpet’ punch in our hands has somewhat bridged that gap.