Losing your hair is a depressing process. Every time you take a shower there seem to be a few more hairs in the drain than the day before. You know what the future holds, thinning and more thinning.
Dr. Kearney knows himself, as he has long suffered from male pattern baldness. He’s researched various options to address hair loss in his San Diego practice, but he wasn’t a fan of the previous options: strip transplantation, prescription drugs, and topical creams. He doesn’t feel strip transplantation provides a natural-looking result, and the other methods are inconsistent at best.
But then Dr. Kearney looked into a new way of helping patients with thinning hair — follicular unit extraction (FUE), specifically a system known as NeoGraft. In the NeoGraft system, individual hair follicles are removed from the back of the head, where the hair is not susceptible to pattern baldness, and they are transplanted into the thinning areas. These transplanted follicles then naturally return hair growth to areas where more and more follicles have gone dormant.
How is NeoGraft done?
The first step is to shave the back of the patient’s head where the hair is still actively growing. Dr. Kearney then topically numbs the area. Now the NeoGraft Automated Hair Transplantation system comes into play. He takes the NeoGraft handpiece and places the tip on the hair follicle. The handpiece uses a gentle pneumatic process to extract the entire hair follicle. The follicle is then pulled up into the storage chamber in the handpiece, where all the follicles received occasional light misting with saline solution.
Once Dr. Kearney feels he has the number of follicles he needs, he begins to transplant them into the thinning areas. Again he uses the NeoGraft handpiece — he doesn’t touch any of the follicles. This improves the success of the transplantation. The NeoGraft tip makes the holes at the optimum depth and then inserts a hair follicle into each hole.
When will the hair start growing?
Over the next few weeks after your procedure, most of the transplanted hair shafts will fall out. This can seem disturbing, but this doesn’t mean the follicles haven’t successfully taken to their new locations. It is simply a result of the hair follicle responding to the trauma of the procedure. The follicles settle in and return to the anagen/growth phase of the hair growth cycle. Most of the follicles will begin returning to hair growth in 6-12 months. From there, they should continue to naturally grow hair for the duration, as these follicles are not susceptible to male pattern hair loss because they were taken from the back of the scalp.
Interested in addressing your thinning hair for the New Year? Call Dr. Kearney at (858) 677-9352 to schedule a NeoGraft consultation.
