FUE Hair Transplant- Optimizing Your Donor and Making Every Graft Count

Greetings,

Today FUE hair transplant procedures have made hair transplants less invasive and much more comfortable for the patient than ever before. Unfortunately one of the drawbacks of FUE is that there is a lower overall yield of the number of grafts from the donor zone as compared with FUT plus subsequent FUE procedures afterward. What this means is that it is very important to accurately estimate the end point of hair loss as well as the  total available donor graft count so that a proper plan for hair restoration can be formulated at the beginning rather than running out of grafts later on and have to leave large areas of bald scalp without transplants.

There is a push to create very low, non balding hairlines, in young patients using large number of grafts. Unfortunately many of these patients will end up with a severe form of hair loss and won’t have enough donor hair to cover the eventual bald zones. In these cases it will actually look even worse with a low rounded hairline and larges areas of bald scalp behind.

Here is a case showing how I used a relatively conservative number of grafts to augment the hair in the frontal scalp. Even though it wasn’t a huge number of grafts it created a huge visual impact. The after photos are only 9 months post procedure so the patient will continue to see thickening of the hairs and cosmetic improvement up to 18 months post procedure. The patient his already thrilled with his results and it show how a relatively moderate number of grafts can still have a significant impact while still leaving a good amount of donor grafts available in the future for continuing loss.

All the best,

Marc Dauer, MD