ciaus

I've never seen an FUT scar wrap around this far, am I crazy or does that look like it goes all the way around and up to his widow's creep??! When I had my second FUT the doc cut along the initial line until it reached the back of my ear on the other side, and then started a new line a bit lower than that one. Looking at his older pictures his temples are obviously very sensitive to DHT.

Unless they cut his head open to add some extra brain processing chips and decided to get in some FUT while they were at it?

Sorry after post saw you were asking for recent! FUT experiences. Uncluttering your thread!

32 minutes ago, voxman said:

For some reason, I don't give a damn about his hair... 

I agree, he has a concealer better than toppik or even dermmatch wrapped around his back!

The addiction itself wouldn't be the issue, but if its causing alot of stress in your personal/financial life, and /or causing you to neglect your sleep and eating habits, then your hair could be suffering from that.

Yea when you wet your hair try to comb/move it away from the core of the thinning area so that its easier to see where the more dense hair begins.

How old are you? You've got some great hair and if you ever do need hair transplants your curly/wavy type is going to help give you some extra coverage with less grafts than other guys with straighter hair. Its hard to say about that midscalp area with less density, some guys have part lines down the middle of their head, may be easier to tell if you wet your hair down and take pics again, but your temples are thinning a little. Worse case have a doc check for thinning and get you on finasteride to get that under control. Any transplants now or in the foreseeable future would be very risky in terms of shock lossing your native surrounding hair.

About your pics, aside from the lighting differences, in the one from July your hair looks a good bit longer all around too which would make your hair appear more dense, and its clumping together in these circled spots. If you were to have run a comb back and upward through the circled spots those hairs would separate and lay down exposing more of your scalp, making your loss comparison less dramatic. That being said, it still seems to be fairly dramatic for 3 months, so like others have said get a dermatologist to check you out, go over your nutrition, health/sleep/stress management, any other seemingly unrelated symptoms that may suggest something more serious.

If it is just MPB kicking into high gear check out this guy's thread, he had a pretty dramatic loss over two years and has since managed to recover alot of it with the meds.

https://www.hairrestorationnetwork.com/topic/52518-growing-hair-back-the-big-3-journey/

Finasteride is going to lower the DHT in your blood, but it doesn't eliminate it. Your hairs will still be exposed to some DHT and over time depending on how sensitive your hair follicles are to DHT, you may still lose alot of them. You don't want to think of finasteride as a cure, it helps delay your loss, hopefully for many years.

If you had a good doctor and technicians do your failed previous procedure, and you followed all of the post procedure care instructions from the doctor, you may just have a bad physiology when it comes to successfully rooting transplanted hairs.

If you do try another procedure better to make it a smaller one to see if you have the same bad outcome again.

Your doner has some thin patches too, these are concerning unless they were from a prior procedure.

Looks like you've had a procedure before, that doesn't look like a natural loss pattern on your hairline. Did alot of the grafts not take root or have they since miniaturized too? That may be why you are being rejected too.

I'm aware of dutasteride but have been taking finasteride the past ~15yrs, its slowed down my loss alot. Dutasteride is alot more powerful and stays in your system alot longer, its less studied, less used, not as old so less of a track record, and not FDA approved for hair loss, so I haven't given it serious thought. And that's even more the case now that Clascoterone was just FDA approved for acne and there's work being done to get the hair loss dosage approved within the next few years -its a topical and works only up at the hair follicle receptors so it should be pretty safe - I plan on using finasteride and Clascoterone together.

Regarding your recent dosage increases - unless you are using a generic brand of finasteride that is inferior/less potent than it is supposed to be due to bad manufacturing processes, etc, more than an actual 1mg dosage is not going help you hang on to more hair, that's what the pharmaceutical research determined when testing dosages less than the 5mg treatment for prostate therapy. That your hair seemed to 'stabilize' for two years was probably just the extra amount of time the finasteride was buying your next group of vulnerable hairs follicles before they finally succumbed to even the lowered DHT levels in your blood.

Ultimately all the drugs are a delaying tactic, my advice would be to wait for Clascoterone and think about an additional HT as a worse case option.

Transplanted hairs should have come from your donor area where the hairs are more DHT resistant, assuming your doctor did a good job, so those should stick around for a good long time.

Agree with the others, very natural. How many grafts were used? And the guy looks pretty young -was the amount of grafts needed considered minor relative to how good the donor looks, in case down the road he starts to need HTs?

Impressive healing and good design, you should have a great result.

You have a cool looking scar too, like a viking tattoo. If I use my cloud gazing vision I'd say it looks like.... an eagle or pterodactyl landing on a perch!

-Hope there's no emotionally charged event that lead up to that and it was just typical rough housing gone bad.

Did the loss start in your teens/early 20s or just a few years ago? Looks like you have some dipping in the back, hard to say how much, or thick because you grow your hair out so long. Any pre-covid pics when you were getting it cut? When did you start fin/min and has it helped you maintain or even regrow any? takes about a year to fully evaluate how much you are benefiting, if at all. How recently your loss started, how aggressive its been progressing, how much the finasteride slows it down are really important in your case because you've already lost more than alot of guys much older than you.

Taking the oral instead of topical with no issues and no plans to stop. You'll shed whatever it was helping you hold on to in the coming months, more or less depending on if you are also taking a dht blocker like finasteride.

Canada has been such a good peaceful neighbor to our north here in the USA....but are things about to get ugly when you guys come for our Rogaine? 

Sorry to hear, I know what its like to be hit with a rare disease diagnosis, I have a scarring alopecia (LPP) on my scalp,  fortunately it has been in remission for some years and was relatively mild even when it was active.

Like you say in your post this is not a well known condition, thought it would be helpful to give a brief description here in case someone comes along that maybe knows someone with the symptoms but doesn't know what its called.

=======

Cutis verticis gyrata (CVG) refers to deep folds on the scalp that look similar to the folds of the brain. It occurs more commonly in males, and most commonly develops after puberty, but before age 30. It may occur alone (isolated CVG) or in association with a variety of underlying conditions or treatments, including neuropsychiatric disorders, eye abnormalities, or inflammatory conditions.

I've googled this back when i had my procedures and the different times you'll find, some even from doctors, range from weeks on up into the ridiculous, like months. The grafts are secure after 10 days. You can play it extra safe and wait until 2 or 3 weeks if you are going to a barber that cuts other people's hair -their blades and scissors having other people's bacteria etc may slightly increase the infection risk if you have some surface skin healing still finishing.

This is about a study where they actually pulled out hairs in the immediate days after procedures to see when the grafts are secure:

https://www.bernsteinmedical.com/research/graft-anchoring-in-hair-transplantation/

And this is from a highly recommended doctor on this forum:

https://fellermedical.com/haircut-hair-transplant/

When can patients cut their hair after a transplant?

I recommend waiting 10 days before cutting the hair. This allows the grafts time to fully “anchor” and become permanent — so there is no risk of dislodging or damaging them during a haircut. It also usually allows enough time to get the stitches or staples removed in the case of an FUT or mFUE procedure. The stitches or staples should be removed before the hair is cut. This avoids any issues with the clippers or scissors hitting the staples/stitches or the healing wound, and it allows the barber to clearly see the entire area and properly trim the hair.

Definite improvement on the scar concealment. It looks like they botched the hair pattern in the recipient area too -these rows of lines -I'm assuming you didn't put any smp there?

I'm thinking the only way to fix/improve that would be to maybe extract some of those hairline grafts and use smp to give a more randomized pattern?

How old are you and have you tried to stabilize your crown loss with finasteride? Like @makehairgreatagain said its a potential blackhole, using up alot of your grafts in the long run if you keep losing.

42 minutes ago, Ndav said:

I ve found that greeb tea , avocdo and  mix of oils are doing good.job in stopping hair loss.

Like Melvin said stuff like this is not going to help your hairloss, that you are forming the impression that it does means you should step back and try to relax as best you can, start keeping a photo record in the coming months and try topical finasteride. See if you can stabilize your loss over the next year and research some doctors on here while you wait.

10 minutes ago, Melvin-Moderator said:

There is more to life than your 20s. I’ve always said this and will continue saying it because it’s true. Going bald is natural, having a bad hair transplant is not!

So true. @jimcraig152 does a good job showing how the bold and determined can take the risk and reap the rewards, but there are alot of people out there with levels of genetic vulnerability to hair loss that would be devastated if they tried the same. 

11 minutes ago, nishchd said:

but what's with the Eye sensation?

Weird, I'm not a doc etc, but i'm thinking you may be just overthinking, that's where the mysterious placebo effect gets its juice.