Hair Loss After Transplants

I have heard that people who have transplants get more loss because transplants produces hair loss of normal hair. Is this true?

First let’s answer this question in the typical young man, for the answer differs slightly than the older men. If a man (under the age of 30) has a transplant and does not take the drug Propecia, the normal course of hair loss that he could expect without the transplant could occur in a shorter period of time (e.g. two years of hair loss in as short as 6 months of time). To understand this lets focus on the causes of hair loss for a brief moment. The four causes are (1) hormones, (2) genes, (3) time and (4) stress. The stress of a surgery in a genetically impaired patient who is undergoing active hair loss (most young men under 30) are being attacked by hormones actively. In guys over the age of 30 when time has already taken its toll and the hair that was going to die, did die, the sensitivity to hair loss is less. In the days before the drug Propecia was released, these men under 30 lost enough hair from a transplant that they had to play ‘catch up’ (which meant that some hair was lost earlier than they expected and this required more transplants to treat). The drug Propecia has almost completely stopped this from happening and we use it on most men to prevent it from happening today.

In men who are older, the risks of reactive hair loss go down, as the hormone attack on the susceptible hair follicles have already done their damage. I have seen far less reactive hair loss on men over 30 and the older the man gets, the less risk there is to reactive hair loss.

In women, the problem differs. Some women, whose hair is easily stressed, could experience a temporary hair loss from a transplant (a minority) but in my many years in the field, I do not recall any female that had permanent hair loss from a transplant.

Previous hair transplanted grafts almost never suffer from reactive hair loss (far less than 1% of transplanted patients).