Restoring Hair Loss

Before doing any work to try to restore hair loss, the main recommendation is to first try to make sure to stabilize and prevent any further hair-loss. You can follow the previous discussion on this.

Now given that you have had your hairline stable for 6-12 months, there are other things you can try. (Some of these you can also try sooner, but there is a higher chance that you won’t get the results you want.

Note that I did not personally need to get any of these, so there is the caveat that this research was mostly recreational. There are likely more mistakes than in other sections.

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Supplemental Therapies to hair regrowth

To supplement your finasteride/minoxidil regiment, you can try:

Microneedling Minoxidil

While you can be using topical minoxidil to prevent balding in the first place, you can additionally supplement the topical by microneedling minoxidil to sites where you want it to regrow hair. It has some effect, but it’s not particularly guaranteed to have large effects. It seems to have a lot of variation between people

Low-level Laser Therapy (LLLT)

Another method which uses lasers with red light to stimulate growth. I don't know as much about this method, but it can have some marginal gains to hair growth over time. If your case is borderline, it can help make it a bit better. It needs 3 times weekly adherence of 20 minute sessions, and help by maybe like +20 hairs/cm2, which is good but annoying and still relatively marginal

Platelet-rich Plasma (PRP)

I haven’t really heard of this much. There are some small trials showing it might have marginal help too, but it’s not going to save you on it’s own, and it’s kind of expensive. I will probably need to update with more info when I learn more.

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Things still under research

There is some potential for the future on things that might also help regrowth:

• PP405 is in clinical trials, entering phase 3

• HMI-115 is also in clinical trials, entering phase 2.

But it’s too early yet to know. If you know anything about these you can comment about them.

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Hair Transplant Surgery

The solution that works most strongly is hair transplant surgery. This is costly and time consuming, but it has been shown to work. You want to be sure that your existing hair-loss has stabilized and stopped before starting this though. There are a couple of main different methods for this.

The hope with hair transplant is that if you get donor hair (from other parts of your body), that it does not have the same DHT sensitivity as your own hair that might have caused you to lose hair in the first place. The two main techniques are below:

Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT)

FUT is a slightly faster and cheaper procedure. A strip of scalp is removed from the donor area, and that strip is then dissected into individual follicular units for implantation. This means that there will often be some minor scarring that is visible, though usually hidden under hair. This does mean to some extent that shorter haircuts become less viable.

FUT is limited to only taking donor hair from other parts of the scalp, such as the back of your head.

There is some limited research on preventing scar formation from wounds, but the research here is relatively lacking and early days. I will write about it in a future post.

Follicular Unit Excision (FUE)

FUE is the most common hair transplant procedure these days, but costs slightly more. It slower and more time consuming procedure, where they graft hairs one by one. This means that fewer hairs can be grafted overall, but also that there is no particular visible scars.

FUE has the benefit that it can take donor hair from other parts of your body than just your scalp (such as Beard, Chest and Back), though these are slightly dis-preferred for having different growth cycles and textures

It is also possible to get a combination of both methods, such as FUT followed by FUE in the surroundings so there is less visible scarring.

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Conclusions

Overall, there are some methods for regaining hair on your head, but there is not simple silver-bullet solution.

You need to first stop hair loss by using a hair loss prevention technique, and you can try to restore some growth with some more early stage experimental techniques, but restoring a full head of hair typically does require surgery, and even then the results are limited depending on how much hair loss you have already had.