The right moment for a Hair Transplant Surgery

Can I get a hair transplant surgery before being noticed with baldness?

People noticing your hair loss and receding hair line and then finding you with thick wavy locks can be pretty uncomfortable to think of, as it is to a number of patients. And this is an obvious question many surgeons get to hear.

Hair transplants grow in very gradually and take a full year to completely mature. The hair comes in so slowly that no one will notice the process. However, if the transplant is done too early (i.e. when you don’t yet need one) no one will notice the result either and the procedure will have been a waste of time and money. In addition, if a hair transplant is performed too early, it may accelerate hair loss.

Hair Transplantation is for them who are starting to get bald rather than who are losing hair. The right time to go for a hair transplant surgery is when the person is at an advanced stage of their baldness. Generally baldness patients are men and male pattern baldness who are anywhere aging between age 28-60 and more. Younger men than 28 years of age are usually at the initial stages of hair loss and hair miniaturization which can be treated with topical and oral medications to slow the process of balding. During the initial stages the pattern of baldness is undetectable and moreover, it is not sure that the transplanted hair will not fall off as it will fall off it’s meant to and no surgery can save it.

A hair transplant surgery comprise of two techniques- Follicular Unit Transplantation(FUT) and Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE).

FUT procedure is preferred and performed on patients who have a good donor site and a larger bald scalp to cover. The surgeon makes a long incision the back of the scalp and from one end beside the scalp to another. This way a strip of skin is surgically removed from the donor site and then that skin strip is used in the dissecting table under a microscope where the surgeons carefully extract the number of hair follicles that would be present in the skin strip and grafting them in 2-5 hair groups. This bound hair grafts are stored in a cold storage while the surgeon sutures the donor site and prepares the recipient site making small punctures in the bald area with a needle or laser beams and once this is ready each individual follicular unit graft if planted in the bald area.

FUE procedure is appropriate when the baldness is mainly frontal giving a high forehead and if there is a special case of traction alopecia or some kind of accident and non pattern baldness, eyebrow hair transplant . The hair can be extracted from the body like hand, leg and chest hair that is more resistant to hair loss.  With the body hair transplant (BHFUE)

The FUE technique is an extremely laborious job for the surgeon because this involves individual extraction of one hair unit at a time or one hair at a time which spans upto 10hours and sometimes requires more than one or even two sittings to complete the procedure. Hence this is a more expensive procedure, however the scarring of FUE technique is much less as compared to FUT, but it is not true that is scarless.

Risks and side effects of Hair Transplantation- is minimal, and temporary, including:

·         Scarring in case of FUT, which fades off in a month or so

·         Swelling, discomfort and pain and itching, for which some topical applicants and pain killers are prescribed, this also goes off within a few weeks

·         Shock loss, which is hair fall for inevitably traumatized by the follicular relocation. New hair begins to grow after two to three months from the implanted follicles and cover up. Some special topical medications are available and a further transplantation can also be done in case of shock loss.