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Hair Loss News Archives
October 2007
Hair-raising ideas to cure baldness
Las Vegas Oct 2007
The most effective current solution for baldness is hair-replacement surgery,
in which follicles are painstakingly moved in small bunches from the thick hair
on the back of the head to the barren acreage on top.
But what if it were possible to move an entire, full and durable scalp from
another person, albeit a dead one, all at once?
That prospect set hundreds of hair-restoration specialists atwitter at a
late-September scientific conference in Las Vegas, where transplantation expert
Maria Siemionow presented research that many believe will make such a thing a
reality one day.
Siemionow, who is renowned for her groundbreaking work in the field of facial
transplants, said her team at The Cleveland Clinic has developed a treatment in
lab animals that reduces the length of time any recipient must be on
immunosuppressant drugs to just a week.
Today, the recipient of any transplant must stay on fairly toxic and
expensive medication for life, which makes it untenable to do transplants for
anything less then life-essential organs. It remains untested in humans.
The scientist told her audience at the International Society of Hair Restoration
Surgery's convention that her aim is to make full-scalp transplants possible for
severe burn and trauma victims. But that didn't keep listeners from imagining
the cosmetic applications.
"What she's talking about … has implications for the future in our field in
terms of perhaps being able to move hair from one person to another," says Vance
Elliott, a hair restoration surgeon from Canada. "We've always considered that
impossible because the immune system rejects it."
Some may think such a move — to don the hair of a cadaver — would be extreme,
but nobody should underestimate the determination of balding people to reverse
the scourge of a receding hairline.
Spending on hair-restoration surgeries in 2006 topped $1.2 billion worldwide,
a figure that does not include spending on proven drugs such as Propecia and Rogaine or any number of disreputable
gadgets and balms sold online or on late-night television.
And, with the exception of trauma or burn victims, virtually none of that
spending is covered by health insurance.
A full set of hair-replacement surgeries can cost as much as $10,000; Propecia can cost $50 a month, and Rogaine retails for about $20 a
month.
"Hair loss can be intensely traumatic and emotionally painful for many people,"
says Elliott, who has performed more than 2,000 hair-replacement surgeries in
his 12-year practice.
He also leads workshops for other doctors, such as the one he conducted at
the Las Vegas conference where 30 colleagues practiced incision skills on
honeydew melons. "A lot of people are very, very deeply bothered by it."
Increasingly, that includes women, too. The society's data show that 13.8% of hair-transplant patients are female, up
from 11.4% in 2004, and that's expected to rise as public awareness grows that
women also lose hair.
Diagnosing women with pattern balding is more challenging because it usually
occurs as an overall thinning rather than in the predictable manner that most
men experience, says Sharon Ann Keene, a hair-restoration surgeon from Tucson.
Also, women can experience temporary shedding caused by anemia, heavy-metal
poisoning and hormone fluctuations, whereas male balding is permanent and almost
entirely a function of genetics. Many doctors don't know what to look for in
women or are too overwhelmed to be bothered, Keene says.
"I get ladies who go to the dermatologist and are told that they're just
stressed out or that it's not a real problem like, say, skin cancer," says
Keene, the conference's program chair. "It is a tremendous untapped market."
Aware that popular culture trivializes and mocks hair loss and that hucksters
give the business a bad name, Paul Cotterill of Toronto, the organization's
president, and others say the society was formed in 1993 to bring credibility to
the practice.
One discussion at the conference revolved around eyelash transplants, a
relatively new procedure that's on the rise but carries with it the potential
for the hair to grow into the eye and cause sight damage. The society released a
position paper saying it ought to be used only on trauma or burn victims and not
on people who desire more lush or longer eyelashes.
"We want to make sure that (procedures) are being done for the proper reasons,"
Cotterill says.
Though the conference was dominated by discussion of new concepts — the ability
to clone hair follicles is in its preliminary research stages, for instance — it
also was a celebration of a business that has progressed from unsightly toupees
to obvious hair plugs to today's virtually unnoticeable transplants.
"I still get patients who say, 'I don't want those awful plugs,' " says Ricardo
Mejia, a hair-restoration surgeon in Jupiter, Fla. "I have to constantly tell
people we don't do that anymore."