Evaluate Your Donor Supply Before Hair Transplant

Before hair transplant, you should consider whether or not your donor supply is sufficient. The most important criteria in determining if you are a good candidate for a hair transplant is the presence of sufficient permanent donor hair. When hair loss is early, it is often hard for the doctor to determine this, since early on the donor area can appear very stable.

Most often, it’s not until the front and/or top of the scalp has significant thinning that the donor area may also show thinning. This is the only time that the stability of the donor area can be adequately assessed.

Before hair transplant, there are some factors to consider.Some say having a hair transplant early is best; before the donor area can thin. But doing a hair transplant early doesn’t make the donor hair more permanent. If the donor area is not stable, the transplanted hair will continue to thin after it has been moved to the new location. This will cause the hair transplant to gradually disappear.

Age itself is another factor to consider. The donor area in young people almost always appears adequate. But the older a person is, the more likely he/she will show donor changes. So the older a person is, the more likely the donor area measurements are accurate.

As to whether or not hair will grow back naturally at the donor site after undergoing hair transplant surgery, the short answer is ‘no’. Since entire hair follicles and the surrounding cells are completely removed from beneath the scalp surface, hair regrowth in the donor site is not possible.

Hair regrowth will only take place in areas in the donor site where the hair follicles were not fully removed. However, since your hair transplant surgeon will harvest follicles from an area in the scalp with the densest concentration of hair, the effect will be barely noticeable. The remaining hair surrounding the donor area is more than enough to conceal the spots where the excisions were made.

A typical session of between 1,500 to 3,000 grafts normally takes a full day on an out-patient basis. You will arrive in the morning and have your procedure completed by late afternoon.

In three to five months you will begin to grow new hair. The transplanted hair grows in very thin at first initially and gradually grows thicker and fuller. Since the hair follicles that are transplanted to the balding areas are genetically resistant to going bald, they will continue to grow the same as if they had been left in the bald resistant donor area. After one year your new hair will be fully mature and continue to grow for a lifetime.