Size of FUE Procedure?

I have read the stories at your site and I think its a great idea to make this forum.

My question is: I am having a FUE transplant in 2 months, and have agreed to have 1500 grafts. How many grafts is it possible to move? Maybe it is an individual answer for each person. My situation is that i have had a strip transplant 7 years ago. It was okay but left me with the traditional scar in the back. I am not bald but my hair is thin from front to crown and now I will have a fill in with 1500 grafts if there are enough available, as my doctor says.

FUE in the 1500 graft range is a big procedure. Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) is a procedure you must be careful of when considering a hair transplant. A graft removed by FUE has a risk of being damaged when it is extracted. That damage can come from:

1. grafts that have many transected hairs when they are taken out, producing fewer hairs removed
2. grafts that are buried inside and left behind, which can cause infections and foreign body reactions
3. grafts that lose the fat that surrounds them, making them vulnerable to fast drying or growth center damage which will impact graft survival and hair growth

More and more doctors are performing FUE, but few have the skills to do them with a very high hair (not graft) yield. For example, if you take out a 4 hair graft, but three hairs are transected and one comes out, does that reflect 100% success or 25% success? This is a very important focus for the individual who is purchasing FUE, as some doctors call such a graft as 100% successful because one hair came out, as it would have in a one hair graft. I would call it 25% success and a kill of 75% of valuable donor hair. Whatever doctor you are considering, please check this point out by asking for a direct answer to this.

At a meeting in the past year, a series of doctors demonstrated their skills in FUE and each had claimed expertise in the art, but alas, only one had good hair yields. This is no surprise to me, no surprise at all. Some doctors claim expertise with limited (or no) experience, and some claim experience without any audit of hair yield in place for each procedure. When I published the first paper ever published on this technique, a doctor who had built no significant presence in the field announced expertise within 60 days of my publication, announcing to the world that he invented the procedure. I remember him well, because he called me to ask me how to do the procedure and I gave him advice on some of the details he wanted to know. When I read about his self-declared expertise, I felt sorry for the patients who would fall into the “spider’s web”.

For more information about FUE, please see:

• FUE Procedure info / photos
• FUE Megasession info / photos
• FUE video