HairCenter

This patient is in his early 40’s and has frontal recession in a shallow NW3 pattern. We started him on finasteride before surgery and performed FUSS consisting of 2,241 grafts The distribution of the grafts are as follows: Single hair grafts - 580 or about 25% of the total graft count. Double hair grafts - 1055 or 47% Triple hair grafts - 521, 23% Quad hair grafts - 85, 5% The patient presented as an appropriate candidate for temple angle closure. Dr. Cooley worked in and around the existing hair and was careful to match the angle and direction of the native hair for the result you see below. The result is one year post.

This is not necessarily true. Some clinics will occasionally place two grafts into one incision in various situations. For instance, if too many grafts were prepared and not enough incisions made the clinic may choose to put the remaining grafts into existing and already filled incisions, instead of letting them go to waste. It is just one possible scenario but the clinic should have informed you of this. Keep in mind that even shortly after surgery you cannot count each incision easily. Some have not formed an obvious crust and close up fast so unless you have magnification to aid your count you likely missed a fair percentage. If the clinic is a reputable clinic I doubt they tried to squeeze more money out of you. That said, you should look at the amount of hair transplanted and not just the number of grafts per incision.

It is best to simply avoid anything that your doctor did not recommend. Follow post-op instructions to the letter and if you have any questions contact the clinic first. Forums are great for general information but for important information about your own post-operative recovery only your clinic should be consulted. The general rules do apply outside of that. Be as healthy as you can with the foods you eat, exercise, don't smoke and avoid stress. Do that and you've set the stage for success.

Dr. Chaudhry, Thank you for taking time to share your opinion. Yes, 200 to 300 more grafts would have made a visible improvement. So would 1000 or even 2000 more. The point of performing surgical hair restoration is learning to balance what can be done with what should be done, or in a case like this, what should NOT be done. The long term aesthetic cannot be sacrificed for the short term aesthetic. When we perform hair transplant surgery we are allocating a very limited and finite resource. When a patient is 25 years of age, regardless of how favorable his medical response may be, and regardless of his ambitions or his family approval, we sometimes must do what is considered to be just enough and nothing more. Ultimately, the patient is very happy. If he was not he would not have agreed for us to use his photos in a public domain. Thank you again for your input.

This patient first came to see me at age 25. He had been on finasteride for four years and his hair loss was stable. He wanted to fill in his hairline and thicken his crown (photo 1). I advised waiting on surgery and doing a PRP/ACell treatment instead, which he agreed to. He returned a year later with clear improvement in hair thickness throughout (photo 2). Because hair thickening is only seen with finasteride in the first 1-2 years of starting, the improvement was solely due to the PRP treatment. He was still very motivated to address the hairline and crown, so after a thorough discussion with both him and his family, we performed FUT 3,049 grafts (with about 600 of these in the crown- photo 4) plus another PRP/ACell treatment. He is shown one year later along with a photo for placement. I see many young men in their early to mid 20’s who want a hair transplant. In general, I get them to put off surgery and start finasteride. Depending on the degree of thinning throughout, I will often recommend PRP/ACell as well. In this case, the patient was highly motivated, had favourable characteristics, and had the support of his family, so I felt comfortable proceeding with surgery. They fully understood the possible need for more surgery and PRP treatments if and when further thinning occurs.

This is a relatively small FUE procedure but one we felt gives a very nice and natural boost for this patient's appearance. The patient was 40 years of age at the time of his procedure and was recently at the time prescribed Propecia to slow or stop his hair loss. Surgically, Dr. Cooley and his team extracted 1213 grafts to address his receding bilateral temple region. The results shown are ten months post-procedure. I have included immediate post photos as well as a final result for the donor region.

Being 44 years of age it does look like you are one of the lucky ones, where your recession is not progressing quickly. However, it is still progressing so you should never lose sight of the future. You will lose more hair so be prepared for this. Take your time, do your research and be sure to ask plenty of questions. We are all here to help.