Al - Moderator

Very nice.

Haha. That's nowhere near a record. I'm pretty sure I have the world record by far. I wish I didn't though 😕

There are a number of men in their 20s with thinning sides and back and retrograde alopecia. It doesn't only happen to older men. My donor hair was thinning in my mid 20s while I maxed out of grafts trying to keep filling in the areas that kept thinning. My donor was depleted at 27 and I was still a NW 5 or 6 at the time.

1. Yes 2. Yes

You can't simply go for the smallest punch size. If you go too small for certain hair types and flesh types then you won't get good, viable grafts and the grafts that they end up transplanting may not grow. If you have root ends that curve or if you have a mushier surrounding flesh or if the hair shafts are very thin and fine then you may need a larger punch size.

For me it was around 1982 when I was 15. My mom was cutting my hair and was yelling at me that I better stop pulling all my hair out because I'm making a bald spot and if I didn't stop making my hair fall out she wasn't going to cut my hair any more. I had no idea what she was talking about, but she insisted it was my fault and she continued to blame me for years for pulling all my hair out.

Here is a random bald guy pic I pulled off the internet. What if he had a hair transplant when his sides were much higher up and he didn't have any crown loss.

This person is classified as a NW 4. You need to take a look at some actual NW 7 people and remember that at some point earlier in their life they had a full head of hair. Then imagine if those NW 7 men had a hair transplants when they were at NW 3 or NW 4. Do you still think those men would be able to continue having transplants to keep full coverage? I'm attaching a picture of Steve Balmer to give you an idea of the difference in the amount of hair between him and the NW 4 patient who got 3225 grafts.

This patient had 1521 triple hair grafts and 449 four or five hair grafts. That's a total of 1970 triples or higher out of 3225 grafts. The total hairs transplanted are 8601. That's one part of what allows this patient to get great results from 3225 grafts. I would have gotten only about half that amount of hairs from the same number of grafts. Then there's the fact that he has very high sides with little to no crown loss. Third he still has some hair in the area that was covered which helps the overall result.

Some of the pain is due to the staples dug into your skin. Once you get those staples out you will feel so much better.

Since you are young and the medication is working well so far, then I would keep doing what you are doing and hold off on a hair transplant.

You may have gotten some shock loss of the hair from the first HT that you may not have realized since you've been going through the ugly duckling phase. That can make it seem like you haven't had any growth at about this stage in the game because you still have some of the shock loss hair just starting to grow back. I'd wait another month or two and see.

Your extremely curly hair covers any remaining thin spots making it look completely full now.

That 2nd hair transplant to fill in everything really did it. Looks great.

Thank you for posting those additional pictures. Now I see what you mean. I'm in a similar situation as you, although I'm in a much worse condition. It's really hard to figure out what to do in these situations. I don't think too many people understand it. You can't really do another transplant using scalp donor because you are thinning in those areas and it will make the thin donor even thinner and more noticeable. Even if you do try it it may not be worth it because the hair is taken from an area that is thinning, so it may only grow for another year or two anyway if it even grows at all. You can use beard and chest hair, but then you have to worry if it will look acceptable in the hairline or if it will blend well in the other areas. Then there's the issue that even if the body hair does grow, you're just fighting a losing battle because in the year it takes for the body hair to grow you will be losing more hair from the previous transplants because that hair is thinning and falling out as time goes by. So you will have to do another body hair transplant to replace that hair and again get no real improvement over the next year, etc, etc. Shaving your head is not really an option because you have scars from the FUT and FUE which will make you look worse than you do now and make you more uncomfortable letting everyone see the scars no matter where you go. then there's the issue of taking finisteride. Even if you want to take it you may be on a losing battle with that too once you've had body hair transplantd to your head because (at least with me) it makes your body hair fall out. I disagree with Dr Bhatti who thinks you need to be on it for him to do body hair transplants. I been fighting this for over 30 years now. I just can't seem to get anywhere no matte how many hair transplants I have. It's so depressing.

Your hair doesn't look too bad to me, but there's no picture of the hairline.

Use beard hair from under your chin if you have hair in that area. It grows well and you won't easily see any scarring as it's under your chin.

That was one patient case with 10 procedures done in 2011 and 2012 when body hair FUE was new and it was the Drs first attempt of using body hair grafts. I would think that the growth rate in current cases has improved since then and almost certainly better than that for Drs who have been using body hair for some time now.

The first FUT they are able to take a strip from the best possible donor. On the next one the donor that was above or below the first FUT may not have been quite as good. You had more grafts done on the 2nd one, so I wonder if they went a bit wider and further forward in the sides. If so that can lower the hair count as the sides are usually lower quality than the back. Keep in mind a 2.57 ratio is very high, so it probably should be expected that you weren't going to keep such a high ratio going forward. Overall you are still above 2, so you are still at the average.

Looks good considering how large an area you had to cover and how small the donor area is.

What do you mean by doing the extractions? At True & Dorin in NY Dr Dorin does the incisions/ punches/ whatever you call it and here's a tech working with him to pull them out.

I would first want to know if you still have any beard or chest grafts that can be used a those would be best to use. Maybe try to get as much beard and chest hair in the next session and try a small section of abdomen hair to put in the crown where no other hair is being used, so you can see if that grows or not.

I only know it happened to me because I took finisteride for 11 years from around 1998 to 2009 and lost a lot of body hair. I stopped taking it around 2009 and my body hair increased greatly over the next few years and is still increasing.

He was concerned about the jelly-like nature of that area too. I tried to lose a few pounds before the appointment to help the process, but I didn't really lose much. I'll do better with that next round, so we can go lower . I do have some decent upper abs under the layer of fat that show up nicely if I work out and lose a few pounds, so that may have helped.

What clinic did you go to?