Buzzing and Shaving Head Prior to FUE Hair Transplant

[jmghair]

If I buzzed my head before having fue surgery would all the hairs start on an equal playing field and grow evenly thereafter including hair that has been shed but not in the resting phase anymore? What is a recommended length for surgery. I was told by my clinic that the doctor will shave hair in the areas where necessary but Im considering buzzing it all before I go in because I've been shedding a little (not noticeably or anything)

[gillenator]

cgog,

 

The transplanted hair will shed and cycle back to growth and eventually catch up with the exisitng hair on your scalp. The dormant follicles as you may already know will rest for approximately 3-4 months before you start to see the recipient area fill in. It takes roughly one year post-op for everything to look even and full growth.

 

As far as buzzing your scalp before surgery, I highly recommend that you ask your doc first before doing so.

 

Wishing you the best with your upcoming procedure!

[mattj]

Like gillenator said, the hairs do all catch up with each other, but the transplanted hairs don't generally all grow at exactly the same time. Some sprout earlier than others.

[jmghair]

When the doc is choosing what follicles in the donor region to punch during fue does he only punch grafts with follicles in the anagen phase not those in the catagen and telogen phases? Or does it not matter? I'd imagine he'd only transplant anagen hairs because all the cases I've seen had a hair growing out of the follicle.

[scar5]

I always wondered about cycles to. Not much we can do about it I suppose. Once I read we shed hair in November, or some kind of seasonal stuff that effects all, and I wondered whether an HT in December was a good idea. It sounds like fanciful nonsense now, but I don't even know why.

 

But whether FUE surgeons get em out well, if they see them they take them is my guess.

 

Once I went into a thread waving my sword about FUE in the face of strip tyranny, and I accused strip surgeons of wasting vast amounts of grafts merely because they excised and sacrificed all the telegen hairs in the strip because the cutters can't see them. They end in the bin - "that's 10% of follicles", I protested.

 

I was roundly warned by a responding doctor that hairs in telegen are not necessarily invisible and many are indeed waiting somewhere up the tube and standing, detached from their nests, waiting for the cutters. The doc said that the numbers of lost hairs this way was negligible.

 

I wondered about 3 months of scalp streching and the effect it would have in 'oozing out' the telegen hairs, but, meh...

 

So I assume, believing the good doc, that FUE surgeons must therefore extract a reasonable proportion of telegen hairs. How they survive the HT production line I have no idea. i wonder how Neograft solved that one!

 

 

 

I suspect

[jmghair]

Yeah perhaps a doc could chime in. What does a follicle in telogen even look like? Is there any bulb there to extract at all? I was shedding for a couple of days but it has seemed to have stopped. I think the amount is negligible anyways when it comes to upcoming surgery.

[mattj]

Follicles will only be chosen for extraction if they are in the anagen phase. Aside from their visibility, without a hair shaft they can't be held while they are pulled from the extraction site, nor while they are trimmed by the technicians or implanted into the incisions at the recipient area.

[jmghair]

Thank you matt that makes perfect sense.

[gillenator]

Yeah perhaps a doc could chime in. What does a follicle in telogen even look like? Is there any bulb there to extract at all? I was shedding for a couple of days but it has seemed to have stopped. I think the amount is negligible anyways when it comes to upcoming surgery.

 

Great question and good answer by Matt regarding graft selection when an isolated extraction is being performed. And he's correct in that the surgeon is basically cherry-picking the best selections available when those follicles are in the current growth phase (anagen). A follicle in the resting telogen phase looks like a hair follicle but "without" the hair shaft. Yes, the follicle, dermal papilla, and hair bulb (root) are all still intact.

 

Really to define a graft is simply described as that piece of trimmed flesh tissue which encompasses and literally "transports the hair follicle(s)" from one region of scalp to the recipient site. The vertically trimmed tissue carrying the follicles are typically trimmed to size of the blade or needles used to create the recipient sites.

 

Best wishes to you in your upcoming procedure!:cool:

[gillenator]

Like gillenator said, the hairs do all catch up with each other, but the transplanted hairs don't generally all grow at exactly the same time. Some sprout earlier than others.

 

And thank goodness they do it intermittently or we would lose the transplanted hair in the resting phase at the same time and look really wierd. When they do finally cathch up with each other, we are referring to normal cyclical behavior.