Hair Transplant Surgery - Pros and Cons

Posted by Mords1944 on May 29th, 2019

Depending on a number of critical factors, hair transplantation can be one of the best decisions you want to make or among the worst. Today we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of surgical hair restoration, euphemistically referred to as connectors or hair transplants. In fact, the most accurate description is "autologous transplantation of hair-bearing skin". This is because the actual procedure involves removing parts of the skin from a hard part of the scalp (donor) and moving it to a bald area (recipient) of the same person. The skin transplant between a person who is not genetically identical twins does not work.

The technique of moving the hair with grafts of skin tissue from one part of the scalp to another goes back for at least 50 years. In the 1950s, a groundbreaking surgeon named Dr. Norman Orentreich to experiment with the idea of ​​willing patients. Orentreich's innovative work showed a concept known as donor addiction or donor identity, that is, skin grafts with hair harvested in the scalp area from the taboo pattern continued to produce viable hairs, even though the grafts had been moved. In areas that were previously bald.

Over the next two decades, Hair n Hair transplantation gradually evolved from curiosity to a popular cosmetic procedure, mainly among bald men at the end of half a year. In the 60s and 70s, including Dr. Emanuel Marritt in Colorado showed Dr. Otar Norwood and Dr. Walter Unger that hair restoration could be profitable and cost effective. A standard of care was developed that, in experienced hands, allowed reasonably consistent results.

At that time, the most common technique consisted of the use of relatively large grafts (4 mm - 5 mm in diameter) individually extracted from the donor site by round beats. This tended to leave the occipital scalp that resembled a Swiss cheese field and significantly restricted the available performance for movement toward the bald areas at the top and in front of the patient's scalp.

Through several surgical sessions, the grafts were placed on the defects that had been created in the reception area (bald area) using slightly smaller piercing tools. After healing, the patient returned to follow-up sessions where grafts were placed in and between previous transplants. Due to the relative inconsistency of this technique, the results were often quite evident and the patient was allowed to walk around with a look similar to a doll's hair, particularly noticeably in the hair's front line and especially on windy days. These patients used to be quite limited in how they could comb their hair and because of the donor's meaningless extraction method, many people ran out of donor hair long before the process could be completed.

In the 1980s, the hair regeneration operation gradually began to evolve from the use of larger grafts to mini and smaller micrographs. Minigrafts were used behind the hairline, while one and two hairs were used to approximate a natural transition of the forehead to the hair. The management of the donor site also evolved from the extraction of round beats to the collection of strips, a much more effective technique. The pioneers in this field were expert surgical trainees such as Dr. Dan Didocha, Dr. Martin Tessler, Dr. Robert Bernstein and others. The concept of creating a more natural look developed further in the 1990s with the emergence of follicular unit extraction (FUE), first suggested by the talented Dr. Robert Bernstein and described in the publication of Bernstein and Rassman from 1995 "follicular transplant".

The 1990s also incorporated new tools into the blend, such as the introduction of binocular or "stereoscopic" microdissection. Stereoscopic microdissection allowed the surgeon to clearly see where a hair follicle begins and another ends. As the 1990s evolved, many transplant surgeons turned away from the use of larger grafts in favor of one, two and three follicular units of hair.

While very useful in the hairline, these "micrografts" were not always optimal for restoring the density behind the hairline. Therefore, even after several sessions, the final result of the scalp only transplanted with micrografting tended to look thin and rather thin. Maybe still