Hair Loss Treatment

What are the options for somebody considering hair restoration procedures?

Hair transplant techniques have improved dramatically in recent years and can now give very natural results. Currently, the gold standard technique is a procedure called follicular unit transplant (FUT). This involves removing an area of skin complete with hair follicles from the back and/or side of the scalp, carefully dissecting it using stereoscopic dissecting microscopes into follicular unit grafts and transplanting these into areas of the scalp where the hair is thinning or absent. Follicular units are the naturally-occuring groupings of hair on the scalp. This procedure is performed under local anaesthetic and most patients will require no more than one to two weeks off work if they do not want anyone to know .

Follicular unit extraction (FUE) is a method of extracting single follicular units, one at a time, using a small punch biopsy instrument. The rest of the procedure is exactly the same as FUT. Use of this technique is currently limited to small sized sessions due to it's time-consuming nature, rendering it less efficient and more expensive. In the future, more sufficiently sophisticated instruments and even robotics that may make this procedure more viable.