What factors can affect hair transplant results?

[Turkhair]

Ignore the surgeon side, obviously if the surgeon kills the grafts it’s pointless. 

On the patient side, what factors influence growth and things we can do or avoid to help speed things along. I will start with what I know and have worked for me. Please add things you know that have worked for you. 
 

Immediate post-op

Relax, don’t go into sun, don’t walk unnecessarily, take it super easy. Don’t bump your head, don’t scratch or rub. Keep the area moist to aid healing. These are all instructions everyone follows as told by clinics.

Medication: 

Finasteride and Minoxidil obviously. Ketaconaozole as well. Multivitamins especially biotin. I have noticed my nails and hairs(beard) growing super fast when I started taking biotin so this definitely has an easily noticeable effect. 

Vitamin D is another big one. Being deficient can cause hairloss. I was severely deficient and when I learned it affects hairs, I started taking it, the texture of my hairs definitely improved and from month 3 to month 4, big spike in hair popping up.

There are many types of multivitamins and minerals, figuring out which specific ones help hairs should be done.

 

Shampooing: 

I don’t know what effect this has. I don’t wash my hairs that often with shampoos, just plain water. I don’t know if shampooing or not has any effect on hair growth.

Hair products

I don’t use any but I have been advised by my clinic to avoid it for a certain period of time. I suspect the harsh chemicals in hair sprays, gels, fibers etc will not help the freshly healed scalp and hinder new hairs growth. 

Age

Age definitely seems a factor. The impressive early growers seem to be very young in their early twenties but it’s not exclusive to young people.

Exercise

Cardio, running etc does that help? I live a pretty sedentary lifestyle but I suspect as do most people and this wouldn’t affect hairs?

 

 

I don’t know anything else that can help get our transplanted hairs to grow and pop out faster. There must be something these early growers do differently that make their hairs pop out faster than others. 

Edited June 19, 2023 by Turkhair

[A_4_Archan]

Forget about it and give them some space (to grow) 😜

 

Edited June 19, 2023 by A_4_Archan

[Turkhair]

5 hours ago, A_4_Archan said:

Forget about it and give them some space (to grow) 😜

 

My results are terrible and I went to Pekiner who supposedly is the best.

So yeah I want to figure out if I am missing something that’s not giving me the expected outcome despite the surgeon being highly rated.

 

[Gatsby]

Some good points @Turkhair. I think one of the biggest factors is expectations. I'm not saying this is you but patients need to have realistic expectations to what a hair transplant can do and what it can't. Some people receive an average result and have their entire lives transformed. Other patients have a result that came from mother nature herself yet wish they never had the surgery to begin with. Psychology is a very subjective thing.

[baldfighter]

could you explain how walking can impact the outcome?

[Turkhair]

1 hour ago, baldfighter said:

could you explain how walking can impact the outcome?

Increases the blood pressure damaging the grafts, your grafts are not secured just barely hanging on, your body is trying to heal and secure them in.  

I don’t mean laying on your bed being hauled one place to another. Some people don’t take their HT serious and party or do things normally as if nothing has happened to them. Read some post sometime back where someone said they  did brisk walk in their room to increase blood flow and help the wounds heal. So yeah there’s a reason clinics advise against this even though it feels common sense.
 

The extreme doses of anaesthetic and HT being somewhat minor procedure means you don’t feel any pain and the effects but remember the grafts are extremely fragile, they’ve been made homeless, suffered trauma. You wouldn’t walk if you had any other surgery, the same applies to HTs. 

Edited June 20, 2023 by Turkhair

[Turkhair]

2 hours ago, Gatsby said:

Some good points @Turkhair. I think one of the biggest factors is expectations. I'm not saying this is you but patients need to have realistic expectations to what a hair transplant can do and what it can't. Some people receive an average result and have their entire lives transformed. Other patients have a result that came from mother nature herself yet wish they never had the surgery to begin with. Psychology is a very subjective thing.

What supplementations do you take aside from the ones I have mentioned?

I agree with you but there has to be factors and reasons why some people get super fast growth and some just don’t. We all have different diets and lifestyles, main medication (fin/min) being same then it must come down to other factors that influence hair growth such as perhaps some vitamin or minerals or lifestyle eg exercise etc

[A_4_Archan]

Actually you are judging the outcome very soon...plus you are taking unnecessary burden about what can you do to improve the outcome...what we can do is to take proper medication ...no other extra care is needed once you pass 10 days and your grafts are well rooted...one more thing to be taken care of is scalp infection ..should not let that happen and for that normal care like cleaning it properly and keeping it hygienic is fine....and imo you qre googling too much about all this which is imo is unnecessary....and results will always vary from person to person thts why its always dangerous when you see a "wow" result of someone else and go for a HT believing that you will get the same one if you go to the same doctor bt unfortunately it doesn't work out like this...no doctor can produce similar outcome with evry patient ....

You may take example of any doctor ...suppose if a doctor has 10 years of experience and do only 1 patient a day than he would have operated at least 2000 patients and from that he puts around 50/100 on his website and you can hardly see around 50/100 real patient reviews even if you dig out all the forums....so you can hardly see 10% of their results and that too who is doing one patient a day so think about other clinics who do 2 or may be 3/4 patient a day....and all tend to make judgments based on this 5-10% of results which thn leads to this scenario later on..

Imo you should check out the results of course but should not expect that you will get the same result ...mainly you should see about how natural he/she is producing the result,how ethical the doctor is,how much responsibility doctor is taking if anything goes wrong,how the donor is handled,how much involvement is there,how much experience the doctor have regarding your particular condition...this all the the things should be looked at rather than just seeing the 5-10% results and expecting to be one of them...there are so many factors affecting the outcome of a patient and all those factors aren't in patient's or doctor's hands and can never be addressed 

"Science will always chase nature"

This is just my opinion and what i think ..i may be wrong..bt my advice would be to wait and keep calm and give it sometime my friend ....

[Turkhair]

I really expected more contributions. 

There has to be some reason why some people results are delayed so much while others get it early. 

Wounds heal roughly at the same rate when appropriate nutrients are available. Hair growth should be the same as well so those who get early results must be doing something right that others aren’t. 

[GoliGoliGoli]

You're focused on things the patient can control, but the biggest factor that makes people have different results is average hair per graft.

Everyone focuses on the number of grafts someone got, but if two people have the same size balding crown and both use 2000 grafts to cover the area, if person A has 2.5 hairs per graft and person B has 2.0 hairs per graft, person A is going to get a much better result.

Knowing how many grafts someone got is basically useless info. 

Edited June 23, 2023 by GoliGoliGoli

[Turkhair]

11 hours ago, GoliGoliGoli said:

You're focused on things the patient can control, but the biggest factor that makes people have different results is average hair per graft.

Everyone focuses on the number of grafts someone got, but if two people have the same size balding crown and both use 2000 grafts to cover the area, if person A has 2.5 hairs per graft and person B has 2.0 hairs per graft, person A is going to get a much better result.

Knowing how many grafts someone got is basically useless info. 

You didn’t even read the topic. 

I don’t care about the end result, what I want to understand is why some people get results @3 months, others @6 and some at 9-12 months.

How to speed growth along. 

[Gatsby]

Age, biology and genetics mate.

[DrMunibAhmad]

3 hours ago, Turkhair said:

You didn’t even read the topic. 

I don’t care about the end result, what I want to understand is why some people get results @3 months, others @6 and some at 9-12 months.

How to speed growth along. 

Actually, what @GoliGoliGoli said is the answer to the specific question you're asking him.

The key factor in early growth is having more hair transplanted per cm2. This is related to the number of hairs per graft, which is directly tied to the surgeon's harvesting skills. If this number is low, then the surgeon is inexperienced, and likely has high transection rates. If this number is low and the surgeon claims it's because your grafts are naturally sparse, he's even more inexperienced for accepting a patient with a poor donor.

Consider this analogy: if you have a garden of 1 m2 and you plant 50 tomato seeds, and in another garden of the same size you plant 100 seeds, the garden with 50 seeds will reach fullness at around 9 to 12 months. Meanwhile, the garden with 100 seeds will achieve fullness at about 5 months.

 

On 6/20/2023 at 2:49 AM, Gatsby said:

Some good points @Turkhair. I think one of the biggest factors is expectations. I'm not saying this is you but patients need to have realistic expectations to what a hair transplant can do and what it can't. Some people receive an average result and have their entire lives transformed. Other patients have a result that came from mother nature herself yet wish they never had the surgery to begin with. Psychology is a very subjective thing.

 

What @Gatsby said is also key. Additionally, it's important to note that many patients opt for a hair transplant based on low-quality pictures and believe the result looks good. When you inspect the same area on your own head, you're using the best camera ever made — your eyes. That's why it's crucial to have high-quality photos before you commit to a hair transplant.

In my opinion, this is the number one reason why patients are unhappy with the outcome and why we see so many repairs.

 

Environmental and biological factors have only a minimal influence on a hair transplant, and you've already identified the most important ones yourself.

Wish you all the best, mate.

Edited June 24, 2023 by DrMunibAhmad

[Drew-83]

I'm going back to the opening post. I'm in the 7th month and the situation is not as I expected. the hairline is fine but in the midscalp there is a noticeable low density visible even with dry hair. taken by doubts if something in the post-op dressing could have affected I contacted the clinic for further clarification. Bearing in mind that I've been taking finasteride 1mg a day for who knows how many years and after the operation I take 900mcg of biotin and 15mcg of vitamin D3,  the clinic initially told me they were acceptable values, but yesterday they said the recommended values are 2000mcg biotin and 30mcg D3 for day. I can safely increase the D3, the problem with biotin is that each tablet contains zinc and with those values I would go beyond the recommended 15 mg per day, in fact I would practically double the dosage (30 mg). I would like to avoid having imbalances on my health, but then I would like to know how much it can really affect the density of the transplanted hair.

[GoliGoliGoli]

13 hours ago, Turkhair said:

You didn’t even read the topic. 

I don’t care about the end result, what I want to understand is why some people get results @3 months, others @6 and some at 9-12 months.

How to speed growth along. 

All of the things you listed are meaningless and have no effect in terms of "getting results" or "speeding growth along" (These are two completely different topics by the way). 

The things that effect getting good results or "speeding growth along" are likely physiological such as how much growth hormone you have circulating and how many average hairs per graft you have. Focusing on whether or not you shampoo too much is completely meaningless. If you have more hairs per graft, some are going to sprout earlier. It's that simple. 

Edited June 24, 2023 by GoliGoliGoli