If You Transplanted Hair from a Balding Area, Could It Save Those Follicles?

It’s always confused me how putting hairs from non-balding areas into areas which are prone to male pattern baldness, works. Surely it’s due to the area of the head, and not the individual follicles? I was just wondering, is there evidence to prove that transplanting follicles from areas prone to balding, into other parts of the head would mean that these hairs would still bald eventually?

For men, the area on the back of the head is considered a “permanent zone” (that will never go bald). So when we harvest the hairs from that area, the hair follicles will always behave as it was from the permanent zone. This concept is called “donor dominance”.

If we harvest the hairs from other parts of the scalp (for example, the front) they will continue to behave like the hairs from the harvested area. If the hairs in the front are genetically programmed to die and go bald over the years, the hairs harvested from that area will also die and fall out (never to regrow). This concept is the basis of modern day hair transplantation and has been proven since the 1940s.

So just to summarize — if you have hair harvested from a balding area, those harvested hairs will eventually fall out just as they are genetically programmed to do.