Friday, October 28, 2011

What Is Modern Hair Transplant Micro Grafting?

By Owen Jones


Although the first tries at transplanting hair took place around 120 years ago, transplants were not truly effective until less than ten years ago and there is a good argument for claiming that it is not even as long ago as that.

120 years ago, the transplants did not last at all. 80 years ago, eyebrow transplants were moderately good. 50 years ago, results were erratic and even 20-30 years ago, hair transplants looked like clumps of scrub grass on a garbage plot of land

All this has changed with micro grafting and at long last, hair transplants are looking natural. The micro grafting technique of transplanting hair is fairly new and is really just one of a assortment of new techniques that are being used these days.

Previously, hair was transplanted in groups of 15-25 hairs, but now hairs are transplanted individually and in pods of three or four, which is the natural grouping for clumps of hair. Micro grafting therefore makes hair transplants appear natural for the first time.

Hair lines were highly problematic to make look real, but now that surgeons can implant so few hairs at a time, it is possible to literally draw a hair line on a head and fill in behind it. This even allows the recipient to pick a hair line.

Micro grafting is a boon to transplant surgeons but there is a different procedure called lateral incision which makes fewer hairs cover a greater area by lying flatter in an even more natural fashion than only micro grafting would permit. Lateral incision techniques have only been with us since the early Noughties.

In fact, there are numerous grafting techniques ranging from micro and mini grafts to quite large grafts of five by one inch strips of skin and there are different methods of inserting the follicles or skin graft. There are lateral incisions, vertical incisions, T-cuts and a number of others.

A welcome consequence of contemporary micro graft hair transplant surgery is that the wounds take less time to mend. In fact the time has been halved to about seven days, although the number of grafts that a patient can endure in one session has been raised from 800 to between 1,000 and 2,000.

The number of sittings required obviously depends on the amount of effort needed to be done, but most middle-aged men suffering from common male pattern baldness will require two to four sessions in order to look as if they have a decent, but natural head of hair for their age.




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