Anyone try any hair transplantation procedures or other hair restoration?

[Sativa_Fan]

I'm only 22, yet I've been losing hair since I was 16. My father started losing hair at that age, as well. Largely genetic, basically every man in my family has been bald. I knew it was gonna happen, just didn't know it was gonna happen this early LOL.

Lately I've been hearing that the new hair transplantation and hair restoration procedures aren't so gimmicky and I was wondering if anyone has had any personal experience with any of them. Here I'm mostly referring to actual procedures where they restore your natural hair line, not some wonder cream that is supposed to magically regrow hair.

What did you try? How well did it work? If you don't mind telling, about what did you end up paying?

 

[Hal]

Hey SF...

I don't have any personal experience with hair transplants, but I too am interested, having had a nice bald spot on the top/back of my head since my mid 20's. Here is some information you might find interesting...the first is an article from the NY Times that gives a good historical account of the procedure and how it has been improved dramatically in the last 5 years, and the second is a link to an article talking about the most recent advance, although it will likely be a decade before it becomes available to we with the shiny tops.

June 15, 2004
Does He or Doesn't He? It's Harder to Tell
By DAN HURLEY

''How you doing, Tom?'' asked Dr. Anthony DiBiase, a Manhattan surgeon, in the midst of jabbing a lancet 1,130 times into the balding head of Tom Raybek. ''You O.K.?''

''Yep,'' said Mr. Raybek, as mellow and relaxed on a mild tranquilizer and topical anesthetic as if he were getting a haircut, which was pretty much the opposite of what he was getting.

At the age of 58, Mr. Raybek, a ski lodge owner from Killington, Vt., had agreed to undergo hair transplantation at no charge in exchange for allowing his image to be used by Dr. DiBiase's employer, Bosley Inc., in ''before'' and ''after'' photographs.

This, however, was ''during,'' and it was not pretty. Tiny beads of blood welled up as Dr. DiBiase's hand jabbed up and down as rhythmically as a sewing machine, making three or four minuscule punctures every second. Two medical assistants standing nearby counted off every puncture, so that they would add up precisely to the number of follicles that had already been ''harvested'' from the back of Mr. Raybek's head earlier in the morning. In the afternoon, the medical assistants would spend nearly three hours using tweezers to plant the individual follicles into the holes.

''Pretty amazing, isn't it?'' Dr. DiBiase said, standing back to admire his handiwork, like a farmer gazing out on a newly planted field of wheat.

With little fanfare, the science of hair restoration has in the last few years undergone vast changes. Hair plugs, infamous for their artificial appearance, are becoming a thing of the past, as scientists refine techniques of transplanting individual hair follicles rather than circular scoops of skin, giving the hair a more natural look. At least one new hair-growth drug is in the pipeline. The cloning of individual hair cells is only a decade away, experts say -- an advance that, by providing an unlimited source of replacement hair, could give even the baldest head a luxuriant thatch, while at the same time making hair transplantation surgery safer.

The market for such developments is sizeable. The Food and Drug Administration estimates that some 40 million men and 20 million women experience hair loss. Sales of Propecia, one of the most popular hair-growth potions, totaled $111 million in the United States in 2003 alone, up 13 percent from 2002. Close to 32,000 hair transplants, 88 percent of them in men, were performed in this country last year, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, up from 29,000 in 2002. With the typical transplant running upward of $10 per follicle, and the average procedure involving about 1,000 follicles, that translates into nearly a third of a billion dollars.

The field's advances have not done away with bad hair jokes: A running gag in the recent film ''Hellboy'' revolved around the doll's hair look of a character's hair plugs.

''The big problem we've had to overcome is 30 years of plugs,'' conceded Dr. Bobby Limmer, a dermatologist in San Antonio and the developer of individual follicle transplants. ''You mention hair transplantation to the guy on the street, and the first image that's going to come to him is the plug.''

But the evolving medical science has come a long way since 1981, when a Boston lawyer named John Kerry, not yet a political figure, represented 16 men whose heads had been surgically implanted with carpet fibers.

''They were badly, badly infected, and in most cases large parts of their scalps had to be excised,'' recalled Roanne Sragow, then Mr. Kerry's law partner and now the first justice of the Cambridge District Court. ''It was pretty gruesome.''

Hair transplantation has been possible since 1952, when Norman Orentreich, a dermatologist at New York University, figured out how to transplant circular scoops of follicle-rich skin stolen from the back of the head. The result was tiny tufts rising up like so many islands of hair amidst a barren sea of baldness. This effect was especially unfortunate at the hairline, where the hair plugs were plainly visible.

Even five years ago, experts say, plugs remained the hair replacement technique of choice; they are still used by some, particularly on the crown, where the doll's hair effect is not as visible.

But on Oct. 21, 1988, Dr. Limmer made hair restoration history by transplanting follicular units, naturally occurring groups of one to five follicles that are sown over the bald area in an evenly irregular pattern that is indistinguishable from naturally growing hair.

Derived from the Latin word follis, for bag, the hair follicle is the complex pouch-like structure from which grows hair, ground out like so much sausage and composed primarily of the same dead keratin that makes up nails. Normally each follicle goes through a five-year cycle of growth and rest, with about 90 percent growing hair at any one time, averaging about six inches per year.

Baldness begins when, in the presence of dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, a byproduct of the male hormone testosterone, the growth cycle of genetically susceptible follicles on the crown and temples gradually speeds up to as little as 60 days. Newly growing hair never gets a chance to mature, and eventually the worn-out follicles die. Hair on the back of the head remains in place, however, because it is not genetically susceptible to the ravages of DHT.

When surgeons first realized they could transplant hair from the back to the front, they thought the follicles could only survive when transplanted in swaths, like strips of sod on a new lawn. But slowly they succeeded in transplanting smaller and smaller sections, until Dr. Limmer, who said he has given lectures sponsored by Merck but does not receive research financing from the industry, proved that an individual follicle, like a single miniature tulip bulb, could be transplanted and grow normal hair.

Like any surgery, hair transplantation is not without risks: Serious complications are rare, doctors say, but minor ones occur in one-half to one percent of cases. But the results have made the procedure far more appealing, and surgeons say it now attracts the Hollywood elite, although not, one may surmise, Bruce Willis or Ron Howard.

''How many movie stars have I transplanted?'' said Dr. Jon Gaffney, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills who recently became a partner in Hair Club. ''Over a dozen.''

But, Dr. Gaffney said, he cannot name names.

''Men in general are pretty close-mouthed about any cosmetic surgery,'' he said. ''Women will share their surgeons with their friends. The ladies are all waiting back home to see how it went. But some men, they don't tell they wives, their mothers, their best friends, their brothers.''

The only men who seem eager to talk about their transplants to anyone who asks -- or even to those who don't -- are the ones in the transplant business. Twice in the first minute on the telephone, Mike Smith, vice president of marketing for Hair Club, the nationwide network of hair replacement clinics, told a reporter that he was ''also a client.''

The man who coined that catch phrase of the 1970's (''I'm not only the president, I'm also a client'') is the founder of Hair Club, Sy Sperling. Although he sold the company a few years ago, he is glad, he says, that the company has recently begun offering transplants in addition to its stock in trade, hairpieces.

''I never wanted to do transplants, because they always had that doll's hair look,'' said Mr. Sperling, 62, reached at his oceanside home near Boca Raton, Fla. ''But today there's so much new technology, it looks absolutely fantastic.''

He added: ''I would do one myself at this point, but I can't. I don't have enough density to work with. If you try to cover a whole football field with a little bit of sod, it's not going to work.''

But Mr. Sperling said he would be the first to sign up if a technique for cloning hair cells was available.

''That I would do in a second,'' he said.

Scientists are, in fact, studying how to isolate follicular stem cells, nudge them into proliferating in a test tube, and then implant them back into the head of the man or woman from whom they were originally taken. Those stem cells, in turn, create follicles and hairs. In March, researchers, led by George Cotsarelis, director of the University of Pennsylvania's hair and scalp clinic, reported in the journal Nature Biotechnology that the process had been successful in mice.

''It was pretty amazing, because not only did they make hair follicles, they also made epidermis and sebaceous glands -- the oil glands that cause acne,'' Dr. Cotsarelis said.

He said at least three biotechnology companies are trying to develop the technique in humans and he estimated that it could become commercially available within a decade.

The ability to clone hair cells would turn hair transplantation into a less risky procedure, because the patient would no longer need to have strips of scalp removed to provide donor hair. At the same time, cloning would provide an unlimited supply of donor hair, allowing far greater hair density than is currently possible. ''It's not like curing cancer,'' Dr. Cotsarelis said. ''It's definitely doable.''

Also on the horizon is a promising drug called dutasteride, being tested by Merck for its hair-growing ability. Like Propecia, dutasteride was originally approved to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia, an enlargement of the prostate gland, by blocking DHT. But because Propecia blocks only one of the two types of DHT and dutasteride blocks both, doctors expect it will work even better, and some are already cautiously giving it to their hair-loss patients when other medical therapies have failed. A spokesman for Merck said the company has not yet decided how far it will go in studying dutaseride as a hair-loss remedy, but the company is preparing the results of a study for publication in a medical journal.

In the meanwhile, Propecia and Rogaine, the two medications already approved for treatment of hair loss remain the foundation of any treatment plan for both men and women, even those who opt for surgery. ''In the old days, we had to plan for extended hair loss,'' Dr. Gaffney said. ''Surgery was like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Now we can hold the line with agents that, together, will have a 90 percent response rate.''

Mr. Raybek had been using one such product, minoxidil, for years by the time he arrived at the Bosley offices on Park Avenue wearing a golf hat at 7:30 a.m. on a Friday in mid-May. As a team of five registered nurses, medical assistants and clinical assistants scurried about, he watched the news on television while Dr. DiBiase drew lines on the top of his head with a Maybelline eye shadow pencil, to show where the follicles would be placed. Petri dishes sat on the counter nearby labeled, ''Raybek, Tom, Rm. 5.''

At 9:10, the cutting began. Dr. DiBiase used a two-bladed scalpel to cut a half-inch-wide strip of close-shaved hair and skin from the back of Mr. Raybek's head. Extending just over a foot long and immediately placed on ice, it resembled a strip of bacon or sushi, with a stubble.

As Dr. DiBiase stitched together the gap left by the excised tissue on Mr. Raybek's head, the assistants began cutting up the strip into smaller and smaller pieces. First, two of them, hunched over microscopes, sliced them into sardine-sized pieces. Then four other assistants began the tedious process of teasing apart every follicle into an individual piece.

Using magnifying glasses to see and surgical knives to manipulate the tissue, they identified each follicle by a tiny black dot, barely visible to the naked eye and smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. From the dots trailed even tinier shafts resembling the tails of minnows or sperm. For the next two hours, as they separated the follicles into mushy little piles, the assistants labored like factory workers.

Although they had hoped to come up with 1,200 follicles, they were 70 short when they finished at 11:10 a.m., a deficit Dr. DiBiase judged to be cosmetically insignificant. He made the tiny incisions into Mr. Raybek's head, and by noon the team was inserting the follicles into the holes. Near the hairline they used single or double follicles, to recreate the gradual, feathered-in look of a natural hairline. Farther back they used three- and four-follicular units. By 2:30 p.m. they were done.

Reached three days later by cellphone as he drove home to Vermont, Mr. Raybek said the only difficulty he had encountered so far was a bit of itchiness. Aside from some redness, nothing on his head looked different to the casual observer, he said, with even the scar hidden by hair. Now all that remained was to wait a couple months for the follicles to begin producing thin baby hair that would look increasingly thick and dark within six months. Maybe then he could ditch the golf hat.

* Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


Here is the link to the other article:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=7115

 

[Andyo]

too close to the light Hal

 

[Guest]

Shit gene therapy is gunna fix all the baldness in the world, just rock the shaved head look until then.

 

[Hal]

too close to the light Hal

Hey...its a solar panel for a sex machine!

 

[Guest]

I have more hair on my ass than my head. Been that way for 30 years. Can they transplant that?

 

[Guest]

i have long thick hippie hair.i could shave my head and send it to ya.
just paste it on your dome you'll look fine.

 

[Huey_Wunder]

Chicks dig bald guys - I have a clipper set, I haven't paid for a haircut in yrs, never worn out comb. Morning wash is a face cloth.

Take that $$$ for a procedure, and invest in growing instead.

hw

 

[alexnalaskaOG]

Chicks dig bald guys - I have a clipper set, I haven't paid for a haircut in yrs, never worn out comb. Morning wash is a face cloth.

Take that $$$ for a procedure, and invest in growing instead.

hw

i never see no hair cutting impliments. if i do i remove myself from their presence...buzzers in ga prisons you get a military hair cut or you get more time.

needless to say i dodged bald. my dad was a come over guy...please dont be a comb over guy.

 

[TrustNoOne]

I have more hair on my ass than my head. Been that way for 30 years. Can they transplant that?

might just be easier to transplant your eyes, ears, nose and mouth. harrrr

 

[ozzy]

seriously...

Check out Propecia (Finasteride) It'll stop what you're loosing and there is a good chance it'll fillout the thin areas over time.

 

[alexnalaskaOG]

i just had a thought...stand back...

army started shaving my head at 19...4yrs

3 1/2 more from 25 to 29 and for good measures i shaved my head again in 2000? have to ask asa, she cryed her eyes out watching me do it.

so, i was wondering if this helpped...i have heard of men doing this and their hair never grew back, but not seen,so?

just my high ass 2cents

lae~32

 

[Piffington]

I have more hair on my ass than my head. Been that way for 30 years. Can they transplant that?

Anything is possible nowadays