Hair Loss during Pregnancy

I have been asked this women hair loss question over and over about alopecia areata hair loss disorder during pregnancy in our Los Angeles hair transplant and Orange County hair restoration clinics. Here is another hair loss question on alopecia areata during pregnancy. One of my patients from our Los Angeles – Orange County hair transplant said that she was diagnosed with Alopecia and lost pretty much all of her hair during pregnancy. Her son is now 5 months old and her hair has grown back. All but one spot. She said that she could hide the balding spot, but I would love for one day not to have to hide it.
This patient has experienced extensive alopecia areata, but she got her hair back after only a few months. This is a pretty good recovery for a condition that could have lead to a much worse outcome. My suggestion to this patient was to be patient and to hang in there. It is very likely that this patient can grow the rest of her hair back without any hair loss treatment. If her hair loss was due to alopecia areata, a hair transplant cannot help her balding condition. However, she would need to be seen and examined by a hair specialist to confirm the diagnosis of her hair loss condition properly.
Women after pregnancy may lose hair due to a condition called telogen effluvium that should not be mistaken with other hair loss disorders. Telogen effluvium is a common cause of hair loss in women after delivery of a baby or some other conditions.

Treatment of Alopecia Universalis

Alopecia Universalis is one of the rare varieties of Alopecia Areata (AA).  Alopecia Universalis like Alopecia Areata is an autoimmune skin condition in which patient’s immune system destroys the hair follicles and cause baldness.  Alopecia Universalis unlike AA involves the whole hair growing skin and causes general and universal loss of hair throughout whole body.
This is the question that we received at our Orange County Los Angeles hair transplant clinic from one of the readers of our hair restoration blog: I am a 38 old woman. I have 2 children. I was diagnosed with alopecia areata problem since I was 10 years old. But I used to get hair back in a year. Like this, hair was falling and getting back was happened 3-4 times. But hair was very lengthy and very beautiful when I got married. After that during second pregnancy I started losing hair.
After delivery of my last child, I lost all my hair and became bald including eyebrows, eyelashes and body hair. I was very lean. I took Allopathy medications. I got my hair back and also gained weight. I stopped the medicines gradually as per doctor’s advice. I lost my hair again after stopping medicines. After that I tried homeopathy such as Bathra’s and Ayurvedic (traditional Indian drugs). No use by any of these. After that I have tried intra regional injections of steroid. I can see a few hairs, but if I stop medicines, I continue to lose them.
1 year back I got affected with Chikungunya (a viral disease, which is endemic of India).  I met a rheumatologist in Bangalore. He recommended some steroids and Azoran (immunosuppresents) for both severe leg pains and alopecia universalis. I have seen good progress and got my hair back. But those new hairs are very soft and not strong. He reduced the dose of Wysolone (1/2 of 5 mg) and maintaining the azoran -50mg 3 tabs per day. After reducing wysolone, I am getting so many bald patches once again.
I met my doctor recently and he again increased the dose of wysolone to 10 mg. I think this is never-ending process. I have almost lost the hope and fed up with all these tests, treatments and side effects and unnecessary spending of money. I was very lean and my weight was 50 kgs at the time of second delivery.
I am 85 kgs now and I am fighting with this disease for 10 years. Presently, I am using the medicines suggested by rheumatologist.  I am having brittle nails and will get headache some times. Every 2 months once I will take blood and urine tests before consulting doctor. The reports are showing more ESR. No other problems for now. I have taken thyroid test and found hypothyroidism.  I am taking thyroxin tablets for that.  In terms of family medical problems, my mother has diabetes and thyroid disease.
Please suggest any permanent solution for my problem. Please help me out of this problem.
Thanks

We receive many questions through our Orange County Hair Transplant clinic on a regular basis.  Following is the answer to the devastating problems on this woman:  Alopecia Areata or its more aggressive alopecia universalis, in which patients experience whole body hair loss, is an autoimmune disorder. Autoimmune reaction is an abnormal response from the immune system that attacks certain organs or cell lines and causes malfunction on that system.  In alopecia areata (AA), patients may have involvement of some other body organs such as thyroid disease or other appendages of skin such as nails and hair.
Alopecia areata could have been activated by pregnancy and led you to get alopecia universalis. A precipitating factor can be found in 15.1% of patients with alopecia areata and include major life events, febrile illnesses, drugs, pregnancy or trauma but no clear conclusions can be drawn. Despite these findings, most patients with alopecia areata do not report a triggering factor preceding episodes of hair loss.
The thyroid disease could be part of the same autoimmune disorder that affected your hair and skin.  Eight percent of people with alopecia areata have thyroid disease; this is higher than the incidence of thyroid disease in the general population which is 2%. Despite the correlation between alopecia areata and thyroid disease, treating the thyroid disease does not generally remedy the alopecia areata.
The prognosis of alopecia areata is unpredictable. Some people lose hair in only small patches. Others may have more extensive involvement like you. Alopecia Capitis or Alopecia Totalis is loss of all of your scalp hair and alopecia universalis is the loss of the entire body hair. The last two conditions are rare and more challenging to treat.  The majority of patients with smaller involvements with alopecia areata, the hair will re-grow completely in a few months to one year without any treatment.
More serious involvements need to be closely followed by a dermatologist or a rheumatologist.  Hair Transplant is not the answer for treatment of Alopecia Areata or its more serious versions.  Treatment might not be permanent and complete.  If immune suppressive treatments are used, close monitoring of the treatment and correcting the course of treatment based on the initial response is the key measure to the outcome of treatment.

Hair Loss Innovation

Here we will keep you posted on the most modern techniques of hair transplantation.

Best Treatment of Hair Loss for CC

There was just a new article on a novel method in best hair loss treatment for a particular balding problem called cicatricial alopecia (CC). This article was recently published in the magazine of dermatologic therapy.  The publishers try to explore the possibilities for hair transplantation vs. excision of balding spots in patient who suffer from cicatricial alopecia.
The researchers believe that surgical correction of cicatricial alopecia can provide excellent results when performed in the appropriate clinical setting.  However we at our centers of hair transplant Los Angeles, California do not recommend surgical removal of balding areas (scalp reduction procedures).  The standard method in Los Angeles hair loss treatment centers of US Hair Restoration is hair transplantation.   To facilitate determination of the most suitable corrective therapy, they proposed two new categories of cicatricial alopecia: “unstable” and “stable.”

The authors portray unstable cicatricial alopecia as alternating hair loss that results in possible subsequent scarring hair loss in either new or old areas. Stable cicatricial alopecia, on the other hand, refers to fixed permanent scarring. While surgical excision is preferred to hair transplantation for both categories of cicatricial alopecia, this preference is even stronger in cases of unstable cicatricial alopecia due to its intermittent and progressive nature.

No matter which treatment method is used for best hair loss treatment for cicatricial alopecia, analysis of specific physical characteristics of patient coupled with a careful view towards the possible evolution of men hair loss pattern baldness or female pattern hair loss are essential to achieve superior long-term results as authors stated.

These physicians have setup specific guidelines for identifying these physical traits as well as for performing hair transplantation and surgical excision to attain the best cosmetic results and eliminate or decrease postoperative problems after hair transplant surgeries.

Hair Transplant in Beverly Hills

Beverly Hills hair transplant surgeon Dr. Mohebi wrote in his blog this article about hair restoration and transplant in LA, California.  Beverly Hills and Los Angeles are known as the Mecca of cosmetic surgery.  Hair restoration is not an exception to this rule and the demand for high quality hair transplant surgeries attracted the best hair transplant surgeons to Los Angeles and Beverly Hills in particular.

We launched the first branch of US Hair Restoration in Encino Los Angeles, California with its central location that could be accessible from many different areas including Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, downtown LA, Glendale, and all of San Fernando Valley.  I did not believe that you should not be in Beverly Hills to be able to provide high quality cosmetic surgeries and hair transplants.  A few months after starting the first branch of US Hair Restoration, the volume of inquiries from Beverly Hills patients proved my theory wrong and we had to start our Hair Restoration Beverly Hills hair transplant office in the heart of Beverly Hills a few months after establishing our Encino Hair restoration clinic in San Fernando Valley.

Are all Beverly Hills hair transplant surgeons capable of providing high quality hair restoration procedures?  I guess we all know the answer to this question.  In fact, Beverly Hills like any other high end cities attracts a mix crowd of both good and bad specialists.  Some mediocre hair transplant surgeons only established their hair restoration clinics in Beverly Hills for financial gain from the patients who don’t have time to do their homework before choosing their hair transplant surgeon.

Hair transplant is considered a permanent procedure and good or bad the results stay with you for the rest of your life.  As much as a good hair transplant can remove years from the age of your face and restore the beauty of your face, a bad hair transplant looks unnatural and stands out as unreal.  I do a few hair transplant repair every month.  Some are done with the old techniques that were once considered the standard of care.  Unfortunately, some of those hair transplants are done only recently by hair transplant surgeons that could have not adapted the new techniques of hair transplant surgery.  I have seen micrograft hair transplants done only one or two years ago.  It means there are some doctors out there that resist or are unable to learn the new techniques of hair restoration.  Those procedures leave patients with an unnatural hair that force then getting another surgery us to remove the pluggy appearance.

Hair Transplant repair is offered in Beverly Hills hair transplant office of US Hair Restoration.  The good news is that having a bad hair transplant is not the end of the world and if your donor area was not violated badly, your transplanted hair can almost always be repaired with a follicular unit transplant that is artistically done by a good hair transplant surgeon in Beverly Hills or elsewhere.

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Dense Packing Hair Transplant

Does dense packing hair transplant affect the survival of transplanted grafts? The answer could be found in an article that was recently published at Dermatologic Surgery Journal.  We do dense packing follicular unit hair grafts using the lateral slit technique on a regular basis for many of our patient at our hair transplant Los Angeles clinic.

The writers of the article, Nakatsui, Wong and Groot describe experimenting on dense packing hair follicular units and following the rate of survival in the transplanted hair.  The density of 75 hairs per square centimeter is studied that is even higher than the regular hair transplantation methods with the current methods. The authors explain that the use of densely packed follicular unit grafts (>30 grafts/sq cm is a highly debated issue, with some claiming decreased survival rates.

The hair restoration doctors who perform dense packing routinely do not believe they have seen any impaired survival. However, no prior study has rigorously analyzed densely packed areas to assess survival rates of the grafts.

This is truth and some of the hair transplant surgeons still advocate lower densities that make patient be committed to multiple surgeries.  These hair transplant surgeons convince their patients that dense packing can negatively affect the circulation of the skin and jeopardize eh rate of growth for implanted hair follicles.

The study is performed in one patient and needs to be experimented on a larger number of patients, but at least can clarify the mechanism of hair restoration with new methods of highly dense packing.  The authors concluded that 98.6% of transplanted hair follicles survived and were able to re-grow a normal hair.  Obviously, this is the first study that demonstrates high growth rates in densely packed follicular units using the lateral slit technique, even at densities of 72 grafts/sq cm.

Although this study is only done in one patient, it goes along with our experience with follicular unit dense packing hair transplantation at US Hair Restoration with satisfactory growth that gives patient better coverage in one surgery.

Hair Wash after Hair Transplant

Here is another hair loss question from one of my patients in the Los Angeles Hair Transplant office of US Hair Restoration. Patient has had a hair transplant over four weeks ago. He says: I still have a few scabs. It just happened that while shampooing my hair, I ended up accidentally removing a scab and the area underneath the scab appeared red. The area that has gone red, I could not say for sure if there was any bleeding as I would have been washing it at the time with shampoo. May patients get worried when they see hair grafts coming out because they don’t want to compromise with the result of their hair restoration procedure.

Patients need to know that the transplanted hair could be vulnerable in the first 4 days after a hair transplant surgery. The most important day is the first day after surgery in which we usually bring patients back in one of our hair transplant offices at Encino, Los Angeles, Beverly Hills or Tustin in Orange County to wash their hair professionally. For more on the hair wash and post operative care of the transplanted hair, you can read on Dos and Don’ts after hair transplant in hair restoration web blog.

Washing after hair transplant surgery should be very particular in the first four day, but after day 4 following a hair restoration surgery, transplanted hair follicles become part of your skin and you cannot dislodge them even if you remove hair. I usually recommend that my patients follow our washing and after hair transplant care directions on the first four days to minimize scabbing after hair transplant surgery and don’t use any other products.

In the case of this patient at four weeks after hair transplant, he should be able to wash and rinse his hair the way he usually does without being worried about losing his valuable transplanted hair grafts.

California hair transplant – FUE

At Los Angeles hair transplant clinic of US Hair Restoration we answer to many hair loss and hair restoration surgery questions every day. Here are some new questions. Patients ask about hair restoration with donor hair from other members of the family. They also ask about body hair transplant or hair transplant from other parts of the body including armpit and pubic hair. They want to know whether or not they may lose the transplanted hair. Below is the answer to those questions and a few more on hair loss treatment in our California hair transplant center.

1- Is it possible to use the hair of other members of the family as donor? No, the transplanted hair acts as a transplanted organ and will be rejected unless patient is on anti-rejection medications like what we can see in kidney transplant.

2-May the transplanted hair at the fore part of the head recede again? If yes, how long does it take to begin? No, transplanted hair will not recede. With the new techniques of evaluation of hair loss before hair transplant that we offer in our Los Angeles, California hair transplant centers, we determine the quality of the donor area, before hair transplant surgery. Most men with typical male pattern hair loss are expected to have stable donor hair and they never lose them. Transplanted hair is considered permanent and there is no chance that patients lose it in regular male pattern baldness. However patient may continue to lose his own native hair if there is any left around transplanted hair. US Hair Restoration recommends finasteride to most patients around the time of surgery to prevent shock loss that could be seen after hair transplant surgery.

3-If the hair recedes to the back of the head, the scar of the surgery appears and it is so ugly. What should we do in this case? And in the case of FIT (FUE) after receding in the back, that area looks very sparse and with little hair? These make a bad appearance. What should we do in this case? Scar or a hair transplant surgery with strip technique should never be seen if placed properly. The only way you can see the scar is if you decide to shave your head. If you plan to shave your head for any reason scar of the strip technique surgery may be seen and you may want to choose FUE (Follicular Unit Extraction) or as some people call it FIT (Follicular Isolation Technique).

Follicular Unit Extraction – FUE or FIT are the same and if done properly should remove hair follicular units evenly throughout your donor area on the back and it should not look like it is thinned out in any particular area. At the Los Angeles hair restoration clinic of US Hair Restoration, the donor area is evaluated with microscopic miniaturization study to confirm its stability on all areas before proceeding with FUE surgery. Of course the donor area will be thinner than before the hair restoration surgery, but density of the hair on the back of our head is not what makes you look bald. Not having a solid frame around your face is responsible for the appearance of baldness and can make you look older.

Beverly Hills Hair Transplant

US Hair Restoration – a LA hair transplant center announced the opening of its new Beverly Hills hair transplant center. Dr. Mohebi said, “We have posted another title in this blog titled “Beverly Hills Hair Transplant” before and mentioned that our patients constantly ask us why we are not present in Beverly Hills cosmetic surgery world. I think continuation of the same trend of demand from the patients asking for a Beverly Hills hair transplant surgeon was the reason behind considering the option of having a hair transplant clinic in Beverly Hills. In our Beverly Hills Hair Restoration center, we perform free hair loss consultation for men and women. We offer a comprehensive hair loss evaluation including the microscopic evaluation of the scalp and hair.”

US Hair Restoration office in Beverly Hills collaborates with a team of cosmetic doctors including a cosmetic dermatologist, a plastic surgeon and a facial cosmetic surgeon. The hope is that Beverly Hills office of US Hair Restoration increases the accessibility of hair transplant clinic for the hair loss patients in Beverly Hills, Century City, Holly Wood, Santa Monica, downtown LA, Pasadena, Pacific Palisade and many other locations in Los Angeles and Southern California who would need quality hair loss treatments – hair transplants from a good hair transplant surgeon.

Hair Loss treatment in Women

Hair Loss treatment in Woman with Iron Deficiency

A 45 year old woman was seen in US Hair Restoration Los Angeles Hair Transplant and asked about Iron deficiency and best hair loss cure. She said her dermatologist mentioned to her that she has male patterned hair loss. She is also diagnosed with Iron deficiency anemia. The problem is whether Iron deficiency in women cause hair loss in male patterned baldness and if so, can treatment of iron deficiency help reversing balding process?

Not having enough Iron either with or without overt anemia can definitely be the cause of hair loss in women. If the cause of hair loss was only iron deficiency and you are not genetically prone to anemia, hair loss could be reversible. However in many situations, patients are genetically predisposed to hair loss and Iron deficiency only accelerates the process. These patients should be seen by a good hair transplant doctor for evaluation of their balding status. Accelerated hair loss could be seen in both men hair loss and women hair loss, in which hair loss may not be reversed by simply correcting this deficiency.