I Had Poor Results After a Transplant 11 Months Ago — What Can I Suggest to My Doctor?

Hello Dr Rassman,
i had a hair transplant surgery,(strip method of 2400grafts approx)from a well reputable doctor about 11 months ago with relatively poor results in the crown area. what can i do in my case, what can i suggest to my doctor? my doctor would make the final assets at the 12th-14th month he told me. (what usaualy happens in cases like mine?)
Thank you

Failure to grow can happen, even if everything is done right. Assuming that your doctor and his/her team did it all right and you did not grow the hair, you should sit down with your doctor for a frank discussion of the problem. His/her experience should produce a good interchange with the risks of failure amongst the possible outcomes. In the hands of an inexperienced team, failure rates might be much higher. On the rare occasions that I have seen failures of the transplants to grow, I have offered to repeat them at my cost. Sometimes it grows just fine the second time, yet sometimes it does not grow even on the second round. I generally wait a year to determine what the results will probably be.

The profession has called the failure of a hair transplant to grow, the “X” (unknown) factor. This distinguishes the cause from the “H” (human) factor, which reflects defects in either the surgeon’s control or the transplant surgeon’s team. Some of the causes of “H” factor include trauma to the grafts caused by drying (leaving the grafts exposed to air for more than 30 seconds at a time), or rough handling, or a switch of the solutions used in error from saline or Ringer’s solution to distilled water (slop in protocols and process of the team).

Failures in follicular unit extraction (FUE), in particular, reflect many elements of damage caused by the extraction process which have been defined by me and some other experts at various medical meetings. Lack of required skills in FUE is the most common cause of graft growth failures. Some of the causes of failure to grow may reflect autoimmune diseases such as diffuse alopecia areata, which has no real physical presentation for an easy diagnosis other than a series of biopsies to look at the scalp under the microscope.