Forty percent of hair loss sufferers are women. Hair transplant specialists in San Francisco note that a small percentage of them actually seek treatment.
When it comes to hair transplants, San Francisco Bay Area facial plastic surgeons Dr. David Lieberman and Dr. Sachin Parikh see mostly men at their practice—but they know that their patient list does not reflect the full scope of people in the Bay Area and beyond who could benefit from a hair transplant.
About three quarters of the surgical hair transplants reported by American Society of Plastic Surgeons members in 2015 were performed on men. That means, of course, than one quarter of the hair transplant surgeries were performed on women. With about 15,600 total hair transplant procedures reported, the data reveal that more than 4,000 women in the country experienced hair loss that prompted them to seek out a surgical solution.
While those numbers are significant, they do not represent the larger demographic figures related to hair loss. The American Hair Loss Association reports that 40 percent of sufferers are women. Put that together with the ASPS’s stats, and it’s apparent that far more women experience hair loss than seek effective treatment for it.
By digging a little deeper, more specific statistics come to light. Many major media outlets, including the New York Times, have reported that about 30 million women in the United States deal with hereditary hair loss.
Just more than .01 percent of women in the United States who struggle with hair loss sought surgical treatment—at least from ASPS surgeons—in 2015.
Note that those numbers don’t include hair loss attributable to other causes, such as hormone fluctuations, stress, or physical damage from pulling hair back into a ponytail. For those conditions, a change in environment, balanced internal chemistry, or even a simple shift behavior may be enough to prompt hair to regrow. Hair loss can also be an indication of an underlying medical problem, so it is especially important to get a diagnosis before deciding on a specific course of action.
For hereditary loss, patients have choices. Solutions include minoxidil used as a topical therapy applied directly to the scalp, and platelet-rich plasma, which involves pulling particularly beneficial elements out of a patient’s own blood and using them to stimulate new growth.
From a surgical standpoint, one of the most common and reliable solutions is a hair transplant.
There have been many hair transplant-related-developments over the years, but the most recent is NeoGraft®, which draws on long-used methods and improves them by eliminating some of the drawbacks historically associated with surgical hair transplant procedures.
NeoGraft® works by collecting thousands of hair grafts from around the head, automating and improving the speed and precision of a process that can also be done by hand. The more modern method reduces the invasiveness of the overall hair transplant procedure, which translates into less scarring on the scalp and a reduced recovery time afterward.
The NeoGraft® system is also unique in that gathers follicles from a variety of places on the head, whereas earlier hair transplant collection methods involved cutting an entire linear strip out of one particular section of the scalp, ultimately leaving a scar in the form of a line. This tactic leaves only a very small mark in the form of a dot wherever a follicle is extracted. These dots are scattered and camouflaged under a patient’s existing hair.
Once successfully collected and prepared via this advanced hair transplant method, the healthy, balding-resistant follicles are placed into the scalp in areas where hair is thinning or lost. A doctor’s artistic eye coupled with medical knowledge and experience leads to natural-looking results that can be indistinguishable from a pre-loss head of hair.
