Hi there if someone take fin and/or dut, given that they respond to it without sides, how viable is a hair transplant over the long term. I see many people with aggressive mbp in the past have gone for HTs and ended up having to shave it all off. Will taking dut, fin, min prevent this outcome for similar candidates?

You must develop a Personalized Master Plan with a good hair restoration surgeon to determine where you are in the process, what you can and can not do and when. A good plan will include good metrics on your hair mass index, donor density and lifetime donor supply tied to your family history with a worst case scenario planned for. Finasteride still can have value at your age.

Scalp hair is often used as a donor source for beard hair. If you would use black hair as a filler, it would bring the black hair into the beard.  Sooner or later, these black (or brown) hairs may turn gray.  There is no guarantee that your re-transplanted scalp hair in the beard location wouldn’t turn gray again sooner or later.  I believe that your question is academic because no doctor I know, would transplant into a full beard with scalp hair just for color effects.

 

It works well when the areas are relatively targeted. See here: https://baldingblog.com/the-use-of-topical-finasteride-with-minoxidil-produces-remarkable-results-in-a-study-on-300-male-patients-with-genetic-balding/

This 23 year old male who wanted to find out if he was a good candidate for a hair transplant. His present Norwood pattern of hair loss is an early Class 3 pattern.  At 23, I normally would not offer hair transplants to someone of his age because: (1) the balding pattern is not completely defined at this age, see example here: https://baldingblog.com/need-master-plan-think-hair-transplants-photos/), (2) I usually ask myself the questions “can he support a worst case Class 7 balding pattern if it should occur?”, (3) his hair thickness is very coarse (see example here:  https://baldingblog.com/hair-thickness-vs-density/) and (4) his level of maturity in accepting the advice of a doctor like me appears reasonable as we worked on the plan shown here together and he understands that his final balding pattern is poorly defined at this time.  I asked him to map out his head and with a hand microscope purchased from Amazon, he mapped out his head and gave me detailed microscopic views of his hair in different parts of his scalp.  The pictures here show that there is some early miniaturization in the frontal area (first set of photos) and that his donor density when calculated by me, showed that his total hair count (total hairs on the head) is approximately 160,000 hairs (an average Caucasian has 110,000), and that he averages 3.2 hairs/follicular unit (or graft). The average Caucasian has a follicular unit hair count of 2.2 hairs/follicular unit (or graft). His available hair is 50% higher than the average Caucasian. That puts his donor graft supply very high.  In addition, he purchased a micrometer from Amazon (at my suggestion) and measured his donor hair thickness (he cut 6 hairs from area [CD] on the third set of photos). His hair thickness measured 72 microns which means that he has a coarse hair.  From a Personalized Master Plan perspective, if he was to progress even to to a Class 7 pattern (the most advanced hair loss pattern), he would have enough hair to transplant his entire head. His hair has a high hair mass capable of covering a huge area of his head, if he should bald further at sometime in the future which is likely from what I see on the various maps he provided to me. At this time, all of his miniaturization is confined to the frontal area of the scalp and the frontal corner hairline.

This is an amazing result from finasteride alone. I don’ believe that I ever saw such remarkable growth in just 9 months.

If it is not approved in the US, doctors will not write an Rx for medical-legal reasons. For example, if someone gets post-dutasteride syndrome, then there is no legal protection for the doctor for legal action taken by the patient.

I feel like my rate of loss isn’t as bad as my grandpas and line’s up better with my uncles. However they lost more overall than my great grandfather, which I attribute to their father’s influence. Neither of them were as bad as his though. I can’t tell if they had crown loss like I do, my uncles seemed to just recede from front to back while I started at the crown and eventually the temples. I believe my grandfather was a diffuse thinner.

Best case scenario is that I take exactly after my great grandfather, his hairline was fairly far back but it looked more or less like a full head of hair, kinda Richard Nixon territory. -but considering he started losing hair about… 100-ish years ago? There’s not many people I can query about regarding the rate it happened. Nor any pictures where I can see his crown.

Today, drugs like finasteride which slow down the loss were not available with your grandfather or other relatives, so you can modify your end balding stage and with a good hair transplant, you can bypass what happened to them.  Look at yesterday’s  post about a 10 year finasteride study, it shows that men with less severe hair loss, may gain hair with finasteride.