Hair Transplants 101

Published on June 23rd, 2010.

What is Hair Transplant Surgery?

Hair transplant surgery, also referred to as hair restoration, is a surgical procedure where hair follicles are moved from one part of the body to another. Usually, follicles are removed from the back of the head, although a lesser used, less successful method known as BHT or Body Hair Transplantation, does exist. Follicles are moved from a donor site to the area that requires hair known as the recipient site. Usually, hair transplantation refers to the procedure used for male pattern baldness, but hair transplantation is also used to enhance or create eyelashes, eyebrows, moustaches, and beards.

Hair Transplant Surgical Techniques

Follicular Unit Transplantation, or FUT, is the standard of care used to transplant hair grafts. The surgery is much more refined than the plug grafts of years ago, resulting in a natural appearance when performed by a skilled and experienced doctor.

Hair grows from the scalp in 1-4 hair bundles, each bundle a follicular unit, thus in Follicular Unit Transplantation, the bundles are removed from the donor site and transplanted into the recipient site in these units. The donor area, located at the back of head below the occipital bone and extending somewhat to the sides, contains hairs that are not affected the androgen, DHT, which is thought to be the cause of pattern hair loss. When moved, these follicles remain DHT resistant, as if they were still located at the back of the head. This fact is referred to as Donor Dominance. Donor dominance is the basis of hair transplant surgery.

In FUT surgery, a strip containing hair follicles is removed from the donor area at the back of the head. FUT is sometimes referred to as strip surgery. Grafts are slivered out of the tissue in their naturally occuring follicular units — bundles containing 1-4 hairs. The hair transplant doctor makes small incisions in the recipient area into which these grafts are placed. The term strip is often used by practitioners of other less successful methods as a way of frightening would-be FUT patients, though the fact remains that FUT surgery is currently the accepted standard hair restoration method. Regardless of spin-marketing of non FUT strip surgery clinics, FUT by strip method is minimally invasive, and top clinics employing techniques such as Lateral Slits and the Trichophytic Closure technique ensure a hair transplant that is natural, successful, minimizes patient down time, and results in a very fine, and in many cases, nearly undetectable donor scar.

In Follicular Unit Extraction surgery or FUE — a less widely used technique — grafts are removed from the donor area by means of a punch tool. In FUE, the doctor cannot see the direction and angle of the follicular unit beneath the skin and there is a greater chance of graft transection or damage when removing the grafts. As a result, punch extraction in FUE, is referred to as blind harvesting. One of the many claims of FUE practitioners is that FUE does not leave a scar. FUE does leave scars, just not a linear scar as in Follicular Unit Transplantation. FUE leaves hundreds of light colored, small circular punch scars.

Given recent advances and care in donor closure techniques used during strip excision surgery, such as the trichophytic closure technique, the linear donor scar created by the strip excision procedure is now often almost undetectable, even upon close examination. Thus concerns about visible scarring in the donor after strip surgery have diminished. This has made the additional cost and time requirements of doing the FUE procedure relatively less appealing.

Excerpt from Hair Transplant Network.

At the moment, Follicular Unit Extraction doctors can usually remove and transplant only 700-1000 follicular units per day. Therefore, to equal the number of grafts transplanted by a typical FUT procedure, several sessions have to be performed to complete one transplant. This is reflected in the hair transplant cost, which is usually twice that of a Follicular Unit Transplant procedure.

In Body Hair Transplantation or BHT, hair is harvested from different areas of the body and transplanted to the recipient site. Very few clinics practice body hair transplantation. This relatively new technique promises much — body hair supply is much greater than that of head donor hair — but in reality, at this time the method does not deliver the many promises made by BHT clinics. There are very few so called “successful” cases of BHT. Even these successes do not come close to matching the graft numbers and naturalness of a typical surgery by FUT strip. Like FUE, body hair transplantation is a blind extraction procedure, extracting hairs using a small punch tool. The great disadvantage of body hair transplant is that body hair is usually much finer than head hair requiring the doctor to extract several times as many grafts to obtain any reasonable coverage of the balding area. Because so many hairs are extracted, the process is time consuming and very costly. A body hair transplant can cost as much as $100,000 USD. So far, BHT is a last resort for hair transplantation. Perhaps only in hair transplant repair cases where patients have aboslutely no donor hair left at the back of their head is BHT a reasonable option.

Megasession Hair Transplants

Many average sized transplants (1500-2000) grafts can be performed in one session, FUE and BHT hair transplants often require multiple surgical sessions to transplant the same number of hairs. Few clinics perform transplants exceeding more than 3000 grafts, amongst them is Hasson & Wong,  reknowned for safely and routinely performing high yield megasession hair transplants exceeding 4000 grafts, and the clinic’s reputation for astoundingly natural results is known to patients, would-be patients, and peers worldwide. To date, the clinic has transplanted more hairs in a single surgical session than any clinic in the world. To other clinics, a megasession is a transplant exceeding 2000 grafts. Megasessions, when performed by high calibre clinics, not only get more hair for patients in a single session, but in the end, the cost per graft is cheaper as only one surgery is required to get the job done.

Hair Transplant Cost

Hair transplant costs depend on the number of grafts being transplanted and the number of surgical sessions required to perform the surgery. Below is an estimate of costs of hair transplant surgery by surgical technique as of 2010:

  • Follicular Unit Transplantation
    $5000-$25,000 USD
  • Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE)
    $5000-$50,000 USD
  • Body Hair Transplantation (BHT)
    $10,000-$100,000 USD

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Lateral Slit Technique

Published on June 22nd, 2010.

Lateral Slit Technique is a breakthrough surgical technique in follicular unit hair transplantation that has been  adopted by many hair restoration clinics throughout the world. The technique results in a natural looking hair transplant, minimizes trauma to the scalp, and allows the hair restoration doctor to transplant at higher densities. Lateral Slit Technique was invented by Dr. Jerry Wong of Hasson & Wong Hair Transplant Clinic in Vancouver, Canada… read more

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Welcome to Hair Transplant Articles

Published on June 22nd, 2010.

HairTransplantArticles.com will be posting all of the latest news and articles about hair loss and hair transplantation as found in the news. Read news and articles about Follicular Unit Transplantation, Lateral Slit Technique, Megasessions, Dense Packing, FUE, BHT, Hair Cloning, Hair Multiplication and more… read more

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