Hair restoration involves transplanting hair from the back of your scalp to areas where you have thinning or no hair. Dermatologists or plastic surgeons usually perform it.
Your blood contains platelets, growth factors, and proteins that play critical roles in your body’s natural processes, like tissue repair and hair growth. When injected, PRP stimulates dormant hair follicles and encourages healthy hair growth.
Platelet-Rich Plasma Therapy
PRP therapy uses a patient’s blood to promote healing or hair growth. Orthopedic surgeons commonly use it to help heal tendons and muscles, and it’s also being promoted as a way to encourage hair growth and give people younger-looking skin.
Platelets are tiny blood components that promote clotting and help form healing tissues. They contain growth factors and cytokines that stimulate cell regeneration and tissue repair.
To prepare PRP, a medical professional will take a sample of the patient’s blood and put it into a centrifuge. This device rapidly spins blood to separate its components, including plasma – the liquid portion with a high concentration of platelets. When a physician injects PRP into a treatment area, the high concentration of platelets stimulates regeneration and healing. When doctors remove the white and red blood cells from the PRP, it becomes known as leukocyte-poor platelet-rich plasma (LPRP). LPRP is known to have anti-inflammatory properties and can decrease pain and swelling.
Microneedling
Microneedling uses a pen-shaped tool with tiny needles to make small pricks in the skin, which cause a bit of bleeding and stimulate collagen production. It reduces the appearance of lines, wrinkles, scarring, pores, and spots. It can also help skin treatments, such as minoxidil, penetrate the skin more deeply.
The pricking process is not painful. Before the procedure begins, a numbing cream is smoothed over your face. It takes 30 minutes to complete. Afterward, your skin may be slightly red and flaky for a few days.
Unlike laser treatments, microneedling does not damage the epidermis and can be used on dark skin. It’s also less expensive than a facelift and effectively reduces acne scars, large pores, fine lines, wrinkles, and more. It can even promote hair growth in people with androgenic alopecia. At-home derma rolling kits that use needles shorter than 0.5mm cannot produce the collagen-boosting effects of in-clinic treatment, which should only be carried out by a medical professional from Laguna Med Spa.
Hair Transplants
Hair transplants effectively treat hair loss and baldness due to permanent, irreversible scalp damage. Like other hair restoration treatments, this option requires a commitment to a lifestyle of healthy habits and continued treatment with medication like Minoxidil or Finasteride.
With this surgical technique, doctors remove a strip of skin from an area with healthy hair growth (known as the donor site), usually on the back of the head, where it won’t be so visible. They then divide it into small sections called follicular units and move them to bald or thinning areas of the scalp.
This process can be accomplished with either the traditional FUT or the more modern, minimally invasive FUE technique. During FUE, a doctor uses a tube-like instrument to make tiny holes in the recipient site instead of creating a long, noticeable scar in the donor area. This method can take just a few hours to perform a session of 200 grafts or several sessions over two weeks.
