Will I be able to undergo hair transplant treatment when I am 17 or 18?

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follicular_unitsName: Brandon

Question: Will I be able to undergo a hair transplant treatment when I am 17 or 18? My receding hairline is causing me to feel depressed.

Answer: A receding hairline is an early indication of male pattern hair loss, which requires treatment to halt the hair loss and regrow hair. However, I would not recommend that someone as young as you has a hair transplant operation. Should you have a hair transplant done, your hair line will still continue to recede behind the implants. This will leave a gap that you can potentially fill in with another procedure after a number of years. The biggest drawback is the number of times you will require further hair transplants. The average is three or four procedures in a lifetime, if you have enough hair on the donor area. Once you have had a surgical procedure, there is no going back. You will be obliged to preserve the rest of your hair since it will look odd if you end up losing hair around your implants.

For this reason, I suggest that you start a treatment programme to help stabilise your receding hairline and to prevent hair loss on the rest of the affected area. A good transplant surgeon would recommend you try a medical approach to treating your hair loss for a minimum of six months before a transplant anyway, purely because this is often enough by itself to treat your hair loss effectively. If you’re 16 or over, you can use minoxidil, a medication for hair loss that has been approved by the UK’s medical regulatory body, and when you reach the age of 18, you can also use Propecia, the second and only other proven medication for hair loss.

 

Do you have a question that you would like our senior hair loss specialist Leonora Doclis to answer? You can submit it here via our HairLossANSWERS form and we’ll get back to you.

This entry was posted
on Friday, June 21st, 2013 at 10:36 am and is filed under Hair Loss, hairlossANSWERS, Male Hair Loss.
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