what are adult stem cells

thank you for your question! you’re asking a question where you wantto know how effective is stem cell therapy when combined with hair transplant? and youdescribed in your question your situation of being 35 years old, being on finasteridefor several years and that you are considering getting twenty two hundred grafts for thecrown, mid scalp, frontal area. and that your doctor suggested the use of stem cell therapywhich would effectively act as fertilizer for the hair graft surgery. i can certainlygive you my perspective. i’m a board certified cosmetic surgeon andfellowship trained oculofacial plastic and reconstructive surgeon performing hair transplantand the use of wound healing technology or

stem cell-based technology in my practiceand i’ve been in practice for over 20 years. i’m also the founder of trichostem™ hairregeneration centers which is a non-surgical alternative to hair transplant based on stemcell-based wound healing technology and i’ll explain that further. i can certainly giveyou a lot of perspective on how we’ve developed what we’ve done with a similar concept whenwe were doing a lot of hair transplants. first of all, the unfortunate reality is theterm “stem cell therapy” is too broad a term and it’s not clear in what way, whatmodality stem cell therapy is being applied in your situation but i can tell you thisscenario on how we came to where we are in helping people with hair loss similar to yourself.for years, one of the biggest frustrations

with hair transplant was the limitation ofthe number of grafts you can harvest and the survivability of the grafts when they aretransplanted. hair transplant is a very labor intensive procedure. it requires several hoursand you are making, for twenty two hundred grafts, you’re making twenty two hundredopenings and on those twenty hundred openings, you may lose anywhere from 10% to 90% andwe’ve seen that scenario play out when people have had mega sessions who came to us forassistance after they’ve lost a lot of hair. so we are using a material for wound healingcalled extracellular matrix and it was with the goal to help the donor area heal better,to help the grafts survive better and a side-effect turned out to be that thinning hair actuallybecame thicker. the concept of stem cell has

to be defined. in the way that i’m usingit in our practice, is we are using a material called extracellular matrix which promotesthe activation of adult stem cells. these are stem cells in your own body related towound healing to create an effect to improve wound healing. now in a case like yours, you’re essentiallyin a situation where in spite of finasteride, you are still progressing and that is notunusual. 60% of men will respond to finasteride but it is well established that finasteridedoesn’t stop progression, it does slow it down. now in the photos you submitted, it’sclear that you still have existing hair in the crown or mid scalp area. now one of thethings, now i’m not being critical of your

doctor but one of the things that is oftenunderstated in the hair transplant world is that when you are making those twenty twohundred openings, there is invariably a certain percentage of native hairs which get lostbecause those areas that you want to treat are not bald. there are actually a lot ofminiaturized hairs. and with that being understood, it was a compromise we always made becausewe knew that those hairs were going to go anyway. what i learned in our practice is that whenwe took someone like yourself and instead of doing a transplant, developed a treatmentcalled hair regeneration where your existing hair, which is already there, stops thinningand reactivated hairs that are growing and

makes thinning hair become thicker (phonerings..he restarts) when we see patients like yourself who arein a similar situation where you have a lot of existing hair that is thinning, when weuse this treatment called hair regeneration, we are actually able to restore a certainvolume and coverage that in actuality, exceeded the results of a hair transplant which isquite significant if you think about it. because imagine if all those thinning hairs whichyou’re slowing seeing disappear actually stopped thinning and actually start grow thicker,then the effect of coverage is far more effective than transplantation. you see, the ambitiousproject of twenty two hairs to cover that area will not provide the density that yourhairs already have per square centimeter.

so what we have done in our practice is wetreat someone like yourself first with hair regeneration treatment before consideringdoing a transplant. in fact, we have been able to prove that after one injection, peoplehave been able to hold on and not have any evidence of regression for 3-5 years and recently,we have been actually been working further developing methods where i might do anotherinjection timed somewhere into the second year to build on top of the results of thefirst injection. so it has been a remarkable treatment for people who come to us from allover the world and see significant improvement. so this is kind of going into the idea ofstem cell therapy but it’s your own adult stem cells without having to do the surgery.

now, understand that stabilization is a criticallyimportant part of your hair loss treatment. and since you’ve already been using finasterideand in our experience, the combination of finasteride with hair regeneration has beensynergistic. there may be an option for you before moving forward with that surgery interms of understanding the role of stem cell therapy. so, it’s kind of where your doctoris suggesting right now is a natural step in which we have gone through several yearsago where we wanted to make the hair transplants heal better using stem cell therapy. again,i don’t know exactly what your doctor is offering so i can’t speak specifically toit but i can tell you from the photos you submitted that someone like yourself, comingto our practice, would be treated first with

hair regeneration. so learn more about the stem cell therapy.speak to your doctor about getting the details of what the stem cell therapy means and whatare their expectations. now, i’m not telling you not to do the transplant but i’m justsaying how our treatment has evolved over the years, we actually don’t see the needfor the majority of patients who come to us with thinning hair, both men and women, tooffer transplantation first but rather address the hair loss with hair regeneration. so i hope that was helpful, i wish you thebest of luck and thank you for your question!