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Hair Transplant
A hair transplant offers hope for balding patients
Hair loss can be both unattractive and emotionally devastating. Fortunately, thanks to medical advances, the surgical technique of hair transplant now offers more hope for restoring good-looking hair.
A hair transplant involves removing skin that contains hair follicles from what's known as a donor site and surgically grafting it into the recipient where hair is thinning or has been lost. This procedure is mainly used to treat men with androgenetic alopecia, or male pattern baldness. During transplant many tiny pieces of skin with follicles are transplanted, unlike a skin graft involving a single strip.
Hair grows in groups of 1 to 4 hairs per follicle. Recent improvements in in this procedure now allow plastic surgeons to move these "follicular units" to create a more natural appearance. The procedure is even called "Follicular Unit Transplantation."
These techniques actually began in the 1930s in Japan. Surgeons there experimented with making small grafts to replace damaged eyebrows. However, World War II interrupted their efforts.
New York dermatologist Norman Orentreich is considered the father of hair transplants in the United States. In the late 1950s, Dr. Orentreich began offering free grafts to his patients with male pattern baldness. His experiments proved that the success of a hair transplant depended on the health of the donor site, rather than the condition of the recipient site.
Over the next two decades, surgeons worked on many techniques. However, the two to four millimeter "plugs" didn't work very well. Often a hair transplant looked more like the head of a doll than a human. In the 1980s, however, surgeons in Brazil and Russia began developing techniques to create "micrografts" by cutting a donor strip into smaller pieces. By 1995, the first medical papers began to appear on "follicular unit transplantation" in which a transplant was done by relocating individual hairs using needle punctures.
In the early 2000s, cosmetic surgeons began to pay more attention to the direction in which a transplant is placed in the recipient site. A "lateral slit" technique was developed that has allowed hair physicians to set as many as four follicular unit grafts in ways that make the hair lie better on the scalp. This in turn leads to better coverage of thinning and bald scalp regions. One drawback to this technique, however, is that it cuts into more blood vessels than the technique known as a "sagital" incision. Cosmetic surgeons are still debating which technique works best, so the best cosmetic surgeons choose the method that they think will work best for their particular patient.