I Want a Hair Transplant Now So I Can Start College with Hair!

Hi Dr. Rassman and staff. I am 19 years old and Just graduated high school and am all of a sudden noticing all my hair is turning baby fine. People are noticing that my hair is thinning on top but I still have quite a bit of hair. Hair loss runs in my family so I am probably going to be bald eventually but I didn’t think it would start this early! This is devastating to my self esteem and I just want to go to college with hair!

Some people say that my hair has always been this thin but I know it hasn’t. It can’t be normal to see scalp on the top of my head vertex area. Is it too early to get a hair transplant at my age before I go bald so no one will notice and I can get my hair thick again?

If you’ve got early hair loss, that is when medication like Propecia (finasteride 1mg) works best. You might be able to take a pill each day and see better results than you could from a hair transplant surgery. The medication can stop the loss from progressing and possibly regrow hair. Besides, no surgeon should perform a transplant on a teenager with early hair loss like you describe. If you find a doctor that wants to rush you into cosmetic surgery at 19 years old with early hair loss, he’s just looking at you as a revenue source, not as a patient.

Hair loss is progressive, so if you had surgery today (hypothetically) you could end up continuing to lose hair around the transplants. You’d be doing yourself no favors in that case, because it would be a very short-term solution to a long-term problem.

Talk to a doctor about getting on Propecia (it is a prescription medication). That should be your first step… not surgery.