Is hair transplant safe

Diagnosis Before making a diagnosis, your doctor will likely give you a physical exam and ask about your diet, your hair care routine, and your medical and family history. You might also have tests, such as the following: • Blood test. This might help uncover medical conditions that can cause hair loss. • Pull test. Your doctor gently pulls several dozen hairs to see how many come out. This helps determine the stage of the shedding process. • Scalp biopsy. Your doctor scrapes samples from the skin or from a few hairs plucked from the scalp to examine the hair roots under a microscope. This can help determine whether an infection is causing hair loss. • Light microscopy. Your doctor uses a special instrument to examine hairs trimmed at their bases. Microscopy helps uncover possible disorders of the hair shaft. Treatment Effective treatments for some types of hair loss are available. You might be able to reverse hair loss, or at least slow it. With some conditions, such as patchy hair loss (alopecia areata), hair may regrow without treatment within a year. Treatments for hair loss include medications and surgery. Medication If your hair loss is caused by an underlying disease, treatment for that disease will be necessary. If a certain medication is causing the hair loss, your doctor may advise you to stop using it for a few months. Medications are available to treat pattern (hereditary) baldness. The most common options include: • Minoxidil (Rogaine). Over-the-counter (nonpr...

When you think of the phrase “hair transplants,” what comes to mind? Is it locks of transplanted hair that don’t exactly blend in with the natural hair around them? If so, you’ll be surprised to learn that hair transplants have come a long way from the days when they were called “hair plugs.” They can now provide the look of a naturally full head of hair. Wondering how hair transplants actually work, and if they’re a good option for treating your hair loss? Wonder no more. We’ve got all the answers you need. Wait, so what is a hair transplant? Before we dive into the details, let’s make sure we’re all clear on the basics. A hair transplant is a medical procedure that adds hair to thinning or balding areas of the scalp, where it continues to grow normally. As the name implies, the new hair is transplanted from follicles on parts of the scalp that still have thicker hair. Since You need to have healthy hair on the back of your scalp for it to work, though—if you transplant hair that’s already thinning, it’ll continue thinning after the transplant and eventually fall out. (Hair transplants also aren’t a good option for people whose How does the hair transplant procedure work? There are actually two different hair transplant procedures. Both start with the surgeon cleaning your scalp, injecting some anesthesia, and choosing one of two methods: follicular unit extraction (FUE) or follicular unit transplantation (FUT), which is also called follicular unit strip surgery (FUSS). T...

Today's options for Treatments have shifted from unnatural-looking transplants to sophisticated new drugs and improvements in hair transplant surgery, and "I started practicing in 1984 and hair transplant surgery has changed completely since then too -- from large to small grafts," says Orentreich. "The large-graft technique was state-of-the-art back then," he says. According to estimates form the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 40 million men and 20 million women experience hair loss. In 2003, 31,737 people, 88% of them men, underwent hair transplants; up 9% from 2002, according to statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. "The history of To perform a hair transplant, surgeons such as Orentriech obtain Small or micrografts are also called follicular grafts and "look better, heal faster, and involve much less discomfort," Orentreich tells WebMD. In the case of hair transplantation, going from large grafts of hair to small grafts "was the watershed that made this procedure so much more natural and because of this, more people doing better transplants today," he says. The Evolution Continues "Hair transplantations have continued to evolve into smaller and smaller grafts and the next step will be to add a cell-based transplant where you can inject hair seeds into the balding area that can grow into a brand new follicle," predicts Ken Washenik, MD, PhD, the medical director of Bosley, a hair restoration practice. In essence, this is cloning. "Within fi...