Transplanting Hair While Still In the Early Hair Loss Stages

Hi,

Why do you say it is such a bad idea to thicken up an area that you may lose in the future? Say if you had hair that was 50% of it’s original density and thinning continually, could you not get 50% of the original transplanted into the thinning so that as the remainder eventually thins out and has gone your still left with what was transplanted earlier?

Thanks!

If your hair loss is in its early stage and a hair transplant procedure was in that early stage there are problems with that approach. I have little doubt that in the young man with early hair transplants, the hair that is destined to fall out, may fall out at a faster rate than they would have had a transplant not been done. I am not talking about hair transplant shock alone (which is short term by months), but rather mid and long term by years from a time frame point of view.

Even though Propecia (finasteride 1mg) works in most men to prevent hair transplant shock, there is no better treatment for hair transplant shock than not having a transplant into areas of early thinning. So if you transplant hair that causes native hair in the vicinity to fall out, you could possibly wind up just replacing miniaturized hairs with a lesser number of transplanted hairs. The net effect may be zero and the preventive hair transplant would have been unnecessary and wasteful. Hair transplantation is a permanent process and it must fit the Master Plan of your hair loss process.

I do not believe surgery is in their best interest for younger men thinking about getting hair transplantation when the hair loss is just starting. All hair taken from the donor site is ‘finite’ which means that transplanting donor hair depletes the donor supply. If a person had 6000 grafts in his lifetime and he uses 2000 of them in an attempt to anticipate what might happen, the reserves for treating what will happen will be less than had the person had no surgery. The young patient can always delay the decision to have a hair transplant. Perhaps meeting again 8-12 months after your initial consultation will allow your physician to reassess the Master Plan to see where your hair loss is going.