alopeciaphobia

That likely helped making those insanely densely packed grafts take hold. Probably another reason why your specific case isn't achievable for everyone!

Another interesting thing to ask would be if there are any other human (case) studies going on (that he's allowed to disclose). The internet is a big place. Perhaps someone who isn't posting on a high-traffic forum had useful findings.

Just a totally random thought. This makes me wonder if regular cardio or whole foods plant-based diets would improve graft survival rates after surgery. Because both are really effective in making/keeping arteries healthy.

Thanks so much for responding. Did you start taking the medication on the day of the surgery? Also if you can look up the exact dosage that would be amazing. I think it would be great to have that kind of information "eternalized" on this forum for perfectionist folks like us who like to give themselves any possible edge. Or doctors who are looking to get even better results for their patients. Even if there's no empirical data showing effectiveness, it's nice to know the exact amounts so it may be iterated upon in the future.

I think most of us are very familiar with native density being ~85FUs/cm², and that ~60% of that native density (~50 FUs/cm²) being a very strong illusion of density (depending on other factors of course). However, what really creates visual density are individual hairs, not FUs. So with 2.3 hairs/FU being average, ~200 hairs/cm² would be native density, and ~120 hairs/cm² would make a very strong illusion of density. But what about the transition zone right behind the hairline (as described here, or here), where it's predominantly, but not exclusively singles? If you would place 50 grafts/cm² there, with say half of them being singles and half of them doubles, you would have 50 FUs/cm², but only 75 hairs/cm², which is actually pretty low density. So I suppose my question is: in a non-balding person, is the area that's say, 1cm or 1/2" behind the hairline also ~85FUs/cm² and thus naturally much thinner in terms of hairs/cm², or is there naturally an increased amount of FUs/cm² to make up for the lower amount of hairs/FU? From my experience, looking obsessively at hairlines of non-balding people, most (but not all) have just a millimeter or two of "softness", after which it becomes extremely dense already. Perhaps hair transplantation surgeons just make this transition zone much wider than it is natively to save grafts and blend it in better with a lower-density midscalp?

What an incredibly unique case, and an extremely aesthetically pleasing, dense NW1 hairline. If donor supply wasn't finite, I think many people would aim to get results like you. Perhaps if future verteporfin trials prove to be effective in regenerating donor hair, results like this may become more achievable for more people. @Fue3361 I'm very curious to hear the full protocol, including dosages and times taken per day. I'm surprised that you were on both Cialis and Viagra. Their mechanism of action is pretty much the same, and Viagra lasts much shorter. So I'm wondering why the doctor didn't go with Cialis alone.

I think (and hope) its just the photo in the first post with the red marker saying T 0.4. But if one got mixed up it's probably best to triple check all the others.

I was just pixel-peeping the results so far and I'm getting the impression that some of the conditions may have been mixed up? It looks like two different areas have both marked as 0.4mg T. In this image here it's the leftmost square (since no excisions are visible to the left) marked as 0.4mg T. Whereas in the image here it's not the leftmost square (as there is another square of excisions very close to it on the left side) that's marked as 0.4mg T. A couple of other surrounding features of the scalp also seem not to match up. I believe that the first photo I quoted (with the red marker) is the first square on the photo below, and the second photo I quoted (with the blue vertical line drawn in it) is the third square on the photo below: If I had to guess, based on having just reviewed all of the photos, the conditions are from left to right: 0.32T, 0.32C, 0.4T, 0.4C, 0.24T, 0.24C, and the first photo I quoted (with the red marker) is the incorrectly marked one and is actually 0.32T. Is this correct, or am I tripping?

Just as I thought your contribution to the verteporfin experiments was already at maximum awesomeness, you went yet another step further! Simply amazing. Thank you, Melvin!

Folks, keep it real. These high profile celebrities aren't going to stick their neck out for this in a million years. Even if they were interested in this, they'd do in privately. We need surgeons and researchers. I don't think aiming to get the attention of a podcaster infamous for pseudoscience or a billionaire megalomaniac is going to help that.

Generic verteporfin exists? I thought Visudyne was the only commercially available kind.

This still needs to be tested. No experiments planned currently, but it could be very interesting indeed. Maybe with the right dosage and injection technique some hair will regrow in place of where the scar was. Only testing will tell. This could be a flat out cure, so I really think it's worth trying out!

I disagree completely. Hair transplants will never look perfect unless the patient is a NW2 or NW3. You can't compare this patient to those guys, or even a NW7 with thick hair. In this patients case, there was so much bald area to cover with low diameter donor hair it's kind of incredible what the Dr did. Sure it's not super dense and the hairline is high, but that's quite literally impossible with current technology. What the patient did get was a head of hair good enough to frame his face handsomely and that makes a great difference regardless.

The response in here is great, although I have to say that I'm concerned that with the whiteboard picture the Dr. has leaked serious personal information of the patient (age, surname and what medications he uses). The patient registered on this forum without his full surname, so clearly he prefers not to be fully identified. Thats not right.

Absolutely amazing, Melvin. Just amazing. So many of us without the network and the connections have been wondering that there must be a couple of courageous doctor's out there who are as intrigued by this as we are. But we couldn't do much about it, no matter how much we wanted. But you did it! And I'm just so thankful for that, because quite frankly there aren't many others who could've! Really really really hope this one goes through, so we can learn more about the ideal dosage. Once the ideal dosage has been established, I'd like to take the plunge and get the treatment myself. I'd fly back and forth across the world a few times for checkups if I have to. Agree with the people above that getting a doctor with a large following, like Linkov, on board could be key to skyrocketing awareness of this. Haircafe and hairliciously etc can post about this all they want, but if someone with professional credibility would start talking about this, other doctors will be less likely to brush this off as yet another broscience miracle cure.

So did all of the interest in verteporfin experiments shift to FUT? I'm getting a bit lost in this topic, and apparently, that's as the 2nd most frequent poster 😅. I remember during the live stream Dr. Barghouthi said the long-awaited second FUE case study was happening in late April or early May. Are we to conclude that this has been postponed again? Is Dr. Mohebi planning on using verteporfin with FUE, FUT, or in balding areas?

I'm very interested as to how @DrTBarghouthi is going to dose verteporfin for FUT. Applying it to a sutured FUT site would be linear, rather than an area, so the dosage would have to be in mg/cm rather than mg/cm².

I think the bigger questions are if the process can be repeated infinitely, and if we even need to take out an existing (healthy) follicle to have a chance for a new follicle to start growing? For all we know we can keep punching out skin in between healthy follicles and inject verteporfin, and every time that happens there's a chance for a follicle to regrow. Rinse and repeat. Not saying this is the case, but it's something worth considering to try.

I was shocked to hear Dr. U actually has some verteporfin in his clinic just sitting on a shelf. Anyone courageous with, say, 20 ish grand to spare who lives near LA? 😁

Very cool that you did this, Melvin! I was shocked to hear that Dr U has some bottles of it in his clinic!

Getting an official diagnosis first might make it a lot easier to find funding.

Many ways in which the human body works are still a mystery. While we of course are all hoping for (something close to) 100% regrowth, it's not sure whether that's possible with verteporfin. However, on the bright side: If regrowth is "just" 50%, imagine having 7000 available donor grafts. That's now 14000 grafts. More than enough to cover a NW6 with glamrock level hair density. Perhaps at the locations at which hair didn't regrow, if the skin is punched out again in a later transplant with a decently wide punch, maybe it gets another chance at regrowing? Maybe all we need to do is repeated sessions of punching out skin in between follicular units and inject until the desired density is reached. Whether that's in the donor region or not. Any decent percentage of regrowth would mean we would have a way to increase the net terminal scalp hair count in a human for the first time in history. That is revolutionary and a breakthrough in and of itself. If the donor area has been overharvested for example, maybe all one would need is to transplant grafts within the donor area, just letting the chance for regrowth increase the net amount of hairs each time.

It's an interesting point, but one runs the risk of having had follicles in exogen/kenogen phase showing up as "false positives". The bigger the meaured area, the more you cancel out the probability of randomness like that. The most ideal way (other than increasing subject count) that I can think of would be a temporary tattoo demarcating one or preferably multiple areas, and doing a phototrichogram before and after.

@DrTBarghouthi Did the second trial happen on the 18th, or has it been planned on a another date?

It's an interesting point. For those unfamiliar, basically the benefit of scarring is supposed to be faster healing. Although aesthetically displeasing, it's an evolutionary advantage to recover faster from lacerations and such. Verteporfin may "remove" this evolutionary advantage in favor of an anesthetic advantage, so to speak. A whole bunch of pages back, it was discussed that with verteporfin, skin elasticity improves slower after injury, i.e. from a mechanical standpoint, the skin seems worse during the first few months, but catches up and improves compared to placebo after a couple months. That makes sense given the purpose of scarring. Edit: just realized it was probably you who mentioned that @MrFox