Everyone has heard of as well as seen hair transplant horror stories, maybe in a magazine, online or even worse seen the obvious ‘plugs’ in a elderly friend or relative. However hair transplant surgery has jumped leaps and bound recently to make it a viable, safe rather than too risky option for all those suffering with male pattern baldness, many celebrities such as for example Nicholas Cage, Brendan Fraser Mather MOcanhey, Dwayne Johnson (‘the Rock’,WWE) Salman Khan (Bollywood) and even Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are thought to experienced hair transplantation surgery, although such may be the stigma attached that do not require have admitted to it publicly, it only becomes obvious when studying before and after pictures.
History of Hair Transplant
The origins of hair transplant surgery stem from Japanese dermatologist, Dr. Okuda, who in 1939 published a revolutionary method in a Japanese medical journal of using small grafts that were similar to the way hair transplantation is conducted today. This technique involved using hair transplant grafts to improve lost hair from various body areas, like the scalp, eyebrow, and moustache areas.
In the late 50’s one physician in particular, Dr. Norman Orentreich, started to experiment with the idea of relocating or transplanting the hair on the back and sides of the top to the balding areas. Dr. Orentreich’s experiments showed that when bald resistant hairs from the back and sides of the head were relocated, they maintained their bald resistant genetic characteristic no matter where they were transplanted.
This principle, known as “Donor Dominance”, established that hair could be transplanted from the bald resistant donor areas to the balding areas and continue to grow for a life time. This laid the building blocks for modern hair transplantation. Through the 60’s and 70’s hair transplants grew in popularity. However, the typical of care involved the application of larger grafts which were removed by round punches and frequently contained many hairs.
In the 80’s hair restoration surgery evolved dramatically, because the large punch grafts were gradually replaced with a far more refined combination of mini and micrografts. This “combination mini micrografting” hair transplantation procedure no longer used the punch to extract the bald resistant grafts. Rather a strip of bald resistant hair was surgically taken off the back of the top and trimmed into mini and micrografts.
Types of Hair Transplant
There are two main methods of Follicular unit hair transplant surgery. Follicular unit Transplant commonly known as FUT or ‘strip surgery’ and Follicular unit extraction, commonly known as FUE The main difference is the method of extracting the transplanted hair. Hampshire aesthetics FUT and FUE are really complimentary forms of HT, not competing ways of which one must make a choice.
FUT versus FUE
The 90’s saw the gradual introduction of a very refined medical procedure now referred to as “follicular unit hair transplantation” or “FUT”. This exacting and labour intensive procedure transplants hairs in their naturally occurring one, two, three, and four hair “follicular unit groupings” in which they grow naturally.
The concept of creating the entire hair restoration using exclusively follicular units was proposed by Dr. Robert Bernstein and was described in the 1995 Bernstein and Rassman publication “Follicular Transplantation”. Critical to the success of the follicular unit hair transplant procedure was the introduction of the binocular microscope by Dr. Bobby Limmer of San Antonio Texas in the late 1980’s.
Dr. Limmer discovered that by using the microscope to look at the donor tissue he and his staff could actually successfully isolate and trim the naturally occurring follicular units into individual grafts. Dr. Limmer shared his techniques and findings along with his colleagues and together with Drs. Bernstein, Rassman and Seager, was a persuasive advocate for the follicular unit hair.
The process involving follicular hair transplants is considered to be the very best among hair restoration methods. In follicular hair transplant, the surgeon transplants hair from the permanent zone in the rear of the scalp onto the affected areas.
If you need a big area covered, then you most likely desire to go for FUT because it is the less expensive in terms of number of grafts for price paid. If you absolutely, positively don’t want strip surgery when you are worried about scarring, then FUE is your only alternative. Contrary to public opinion, both methods leave scars. FUT will leave a narrow line over the back of one’s head, whereas FUE will leave little unpigmented dots over the back of one’s head. The only difference is that the FUE scars are not concentrated together and for that reason harder to detect when wearing hair very short.
There is absolutely no doubt that FUE procedures are harsher on the grafts than FUT procedures. For this reason the final growth yields are generally lower for FUE compared to FUT. But BOTH procedures work for the most part.