What is FOX Negative?

What does FOX negative mean?

Thanks.

We coined the term “FOX” at New Hair Institute back in 2002 for FOllicular unit eXtraction. We thought FOX sounded better than FUE. We also published a paper on follicular unit extraction, describing how some patients are good FOX/FUE candidates and some are not.

I realize FUE is performed at many clinics without any pre-testing on all patients who want to have the surgery, however at NHI we pre-qualify potential patients with a FOX/FUE test to see if they are good candidates. A very small percentage of patients will have high transection rates with FUE and these are the FOX negative patients we are talking about.

We generally do not recommend FOX/FUE surgery if the transection rate is approaching 20% or more. If the patient is FOX negative, it is an inherent problem to the patient (not the doctor or clinic or machine). As we wrote about our experience with NeoGraft a week ago, the machine could not successfully harvest a known FOX negative patient.