Hair Transplantation to relocate your own hair to cover your hair loss

Hair restoration candidates are required to have a healthy or baldness resistant hair that typically grows in the back of their scalp and above the ears and this is used as the donor hair to be extracted and replaced in bald area referred as recipient area. Factors, such as hair color, texture and waviness or curliness of the donor hair may affect the result.

Determining the donor hair quality and the right surgical procedure includes a long term consultation session between the patient and surgeon. Where the surgeon use densitometry to assess the patient’s donor site quality; the patient’s medical history is assessed to locate the exact cause of hair loss and baldness including patient’s lifestyle habits like smoking, drinking, diet and working habits; patient’s drug usage including herbal remedies and medications to fight hair loss. The patient’s physical and mental health is also checked and lastly the patient’s expectations are understood and in exchange the patient is explained of the realistic expectations that can be associated from this surgery.

The advancements of hair transplantation nowadays are Follicular Unit Transplant/ Transfer (FUT) and Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) that are useful and not so useful in their own norms. A hair transplant surgery is done under local anaesthesia and takes from 6-10hours in one or more sessions depending on the procedure and the amount of hair transplanted. There are a number of associative techniques used in this surgery. Sometimes, two or more techniques are used to achieve the best results. Transplant techniques, such as micro-grafts, follicular unit transfer, and single unit transfers are generally performed on patients who desire a fuller, thicker head of hair.

Follicular Unit Transplantation is an invasive surgery where the excision of a strip of skin from the donor site is involved, which derives from the traditional strip harvesting process that has been advanced and replaced with FUT. This procedure involves cropping the hair short and excising a narrow strip of scalp skin from the donor site that we discussed earlier in the article, is resistant to hair loss. The skin is removed using a manual forceps and scalpel under local anaesthesia that is injected prior to the surgery and helps tighten the blood vessels and tissues causing less blood loss. The removed strip of skin would contain hundreds of hair follicular units. Each follicular unit from the donor strip contains one to four hair follicles or strands of hair. The strip of skin is put under a microscope, where the individual hairs follicles are dissected very carefully; this part is called graft dissection.

FUT is sometimes also combined with dense packing techniques in a mega sessions wherein as many as 2200 follicular units can be transferred in one mega session.

Once the donor hair is ready, it is transplanted into the recipient area by ways of tiny pinprick incisions that is made using specialised needle punches or laser beams. Sometime laser beams can cause minor burns in the recipient hole that can affect the final results also, that’s why surgeons greatly depend on a motorised incision devise which prepares the recipient area with accurate precision and evenness that would be very difficult for the surgeon to do with manual punches. The pinprick incisions are made into irregular patterns to mimic a fuller and thicker nature. Once the making the incisions are complete, thin forceps are used to microscopically plant the donor hair into the tiny holes. The holes close in within a week. And hold up the hair grafts as tightly as natural hair roots would, progressing its growth and density soon after.

An average FUT procedure is performed on an outpatient basis and spans from 6 to 7 hours and can yield the maximum hair to be transplanted because that one strip of skin can provide thousands of follicles under one session without the requirement of further sessions.

The surgical scar is sutured back in to a fine line whose fineness depends a lot on the surgeon’s artistry, all in all which is supposed to fade off within a month or so. And completely disappear over a few more months of time. The first night post op and a few more days and nights might be exposed minor or major discomfort like pain, burning or any such discomfort.

Follicular Unit Extraction is a minimally invasive surgery which rejects the usage of strip excision. This is done by manually extracting each individual hair follicular unit with the use of a number of manual or motorised extraction devices to safely extract the hair follicular units without damaging the grafts. The hair can also be extracted from the body like arms, legs and beard that are usually resistant to baldness. However there will be major variation in the quality of the hair because certainly the hair in your scalp is different in texture than that in your arms and legs.

A hair transplant cost in London is priced anywhere between £2,000 to £9,000 that is dependent on your chosen clinic, surgeon, amount of grafting, use of anaesthetics, whether or not you are staying overnight and post op care required. It is regarded spare your hair transplant costing with the most eminent and reputed surgeon to avoid any complication costs.