Avoiding Pitfalls in Planning a Hair Transplant

Although many technical advances have been manufactured in the field of surgical hair restoration over the past decade, particularly with the widespread adoption of follicular transplantation, many problems remain. Almost all revolve around doctors recommending surgery for patients who are not good candidates. implant capillaire The most typical reasons that patients should not proceed with surgery are that they are too young and that their hair loss pattern is too unpredictable. Young persons also have expectations that are typically too much – often demanding the density and hairline of an adolescent. Many people who are in the early stages of hair thinning should simply be treated with medications, rather than being rushed to go under the knife. Plus some patients are just not mature enough to make level-headed decisions when their problem is so emotional.

In general, the younger the individual, the more cautious the practitioner should be to operate, particularly if the patient has a family history of Norwood Class VII hair loss, or diffuse un-patterned alopecia.

Problems also occur once the doctor fails to adequately measure the patient’s donor hair supply and doesn’t have enough hair to accomplish the patient’s goals. Careful measurement of a patient’s density and other scalp characteristics will allow the surgeon to learn how much hair is available for transplantation and enable him/her to create a pattern for the restoration which can be achieved within those constraints.

In all of these situations, spending a little extra time listening to the patient’s concerns, examining the patient more carefully and then recommending cure plan that is in keeping with what actually could be accomplished, will go a long way towards having satisfied patients. Unfortunately, scientific advances will improve only the technical aspects of the hair restoration process and can do little to insure that the procedure will undoubtedly be performed with the proper planning or on the correct patient.

Five-year View

The improvement in surgical techniques which have enabled an increasing number of grafts to be placed into ever smaller recipient sites had nearly reached its limit and the limitations of the donor supply remain the major constraint for patients getting back a full head of hair. Despite the great initial enthusiasm of follicular unit extraction, a technique where hair can be harvested directly from the donor scalp (or even the body) without a linear scar, this procedure has added relatively little towards increasing the patient’s total hair supply designed for a transplant. The major breakthrough should come when the donor supply can be expanded though cloning. Although some recent progress have been made in this area (particularly in animal models) the opportunity to clone human hair is at least 5 to 10 years away.