Should You Consider Surgical Hair Restoration?
Medical hair
restoration is a field of cosmetic surgery that has seen great advances
since the 1980s. The best candidates for surgical hair restoration are
men who have good hair growth on the sides and back of their head and
who do not have rapidly progressive male pattern baldness. Essentially,
this is an issue of not waiting too long. If you have only a fringe of
hair left, there is little that can be done for you.
Surgical Hair Restoration
Permanent hair transplant via surgical methods can be accomplished in a
number of ways, either by harvesting follicles and relocating them to
balding areas of the scalp or by removing the balding areas and
stretching adjacent hair bearing tissue in to place to cover the gap
created.
Hair Transplant Surgery
Hair
restoration surgery or hair follicle transplantation takes
approximately four hours and is conducted under a mild sedative in
conjunction with a topical, local anesthetic. First the patient is
shampooed and then the scalp is treated with anti-bacterial medication.
The surgeon selects an area at the back of the scalp to harvest a graft
with good hair growth. Usually the piece removed will measure 2 x 10
centimeters.
Individual units are then dissected from the strip
under a microscope. Excess fibrous and fatty tissues are carefully
removed to gain access to the individual follicles. The surgeon then
uses a fine needle and painstakingly punctures the balding spot with a
predetermined pattern of density. By paying careful attention to angle,
the surgeon duplicates a natural growth pattern. The follicles that
have been extracted are then inserted into the punctures.
After
the surgery the patient will wear semi-permeable bandages that allow
for drainage. These bandages will be changed daily and there can be no
exposure to the sun and no shampooing for at least a week. The patient
should not be concerned when all of the transplanted hairs fall out in
the first week to ten days. New hairs will be produced by the
transplanted follicles in two to three months. This hair will grow
normally and thicken for six to nine months.
Subsequent hair
loss can occur in untreated areas and some transplant patients take
medications to retard further balding. Others assume they will require
additional transplantation in the future. For the most part this is a
procedure that is reasonably affordable. Hair transplant surgery
normally costs in the neighborhood of $4,000.
Alopecia Reduction Surgery
Another form of hair loss restoration
is alopecia reduction surgery; a procedure in which bald scalp is
actually removed and the hair-bearing tissue is pulled forward. This
may be done as a single treatment, as part of a hair transplant, or
occasionally in conjunction with a facial cosmetic procedure like a
brow or forehead lift.
A very similar procedure is scalp
expansion surgery in which a device resembling a balloon is placed
under the skin. Over a period of time (usually two weeks) this device
expands the balding scalp. The device is then deflated and removed, the
excess scalp is cut away, and hair bearing scalp is brought forward to
cover the area.
In
scalp flap surgery, a flap of scalp and underlying tissue are moved
from one area of the head to another. The flaps are either "pedicle" or
"free." Pedicle flaps are removed and relocated with the artery-vein
blood supply intact. This is the kind of flap most often used in
cosmetic hair surgeries and the presence of the consistent blood supply
greatly enhances the survival rate of the flap. A free flap does not
have the artery-vein attachment and a reattachment of the blood supply
via microsurgery must occur at the new site. This type of flap is most
often used in reconstructive surgery to repair a trauma or correct a
congenital defect.
Since the 1980s scalp flaps have been used
only rarely for cosmetic surgery with frontal hair transplants and
scalp reduction or expansion being the preferred methods. After any of
these procedures the patient will wear dressings that must be changed
on a daily basis and will be given explicit instructions for wound care
and cleansing of both the surgical site and the surrounding hair.
Possible Complications
There
are potential complications with medical hair restoration, mainly with
the procedures in which the scalp is stretched. Essentially the tissue
can attempt to stretch back toward its original location. There is also
a danger of excess scarring at the point of the required incisions.
While these conditions are rare, they can occur and should be
thoroughly discussed with your surgeon.
The only real potential
complications in a hair transplant procedure are infection at the site
from which the graft material was removed or a failure of the
transplanted follicles to survive in their new location. Both of these
events are extremely rare.
There
will be temporary numbness and swelling following each of the surgical
procedures. Recovery time varies with the extent of the work performed
and with the individual patient but normally within two to three weeks
normal activities can be resumed with full recovery in six weeks to two
months.
