When is the Right Time to Consider Hair Restoration?

Americans are no strangers to hair loss — about half of women experience this issue, and men fare even worse. Two-thirds of men will experience noticeable hair loss by the age of 35.

As your hair starts to thin and the loss becomes increasingly noticeable, you start to ponder your next steps. We’re here to urge you not to delay your hair restoration efforts.

If the experienced team of board-certified dermatologists at Vivida Dermatology has learned anything, it’s that early intervention is almost always best. This is certainly true when it comes to the gold standard for hair restoration — follicular unit extraction (FUE) hair transplantation.

Let’s dive into hair loss and why you should tackle hair restoration sooner rather than later.

Why we lose hair

There are several reasons why both men and women lose hair as time goes by. The most common ones include:

• Aging
• Genetics
• Hormone shifts, such as menopause

The first risk factor for hair loss, aging, occurs because your hair follicles — like any other part of your body — can weaken and lose function over time. Under normal circumstances, your hair follicles are in one of four stages at any given time:

1. Telegen — resting 
2. Catagen — transition 
3. Anagen — growth
4. Exogen — shedding

Over time, your hair follicles start to cycle through these stages more quickly and, eventually, the hair follicle ceases to produce hair altogether. The end result is hair thinning that can eventually lead to full baldness.

An early start with FUE

The reason why FUE is considered the gold standard for hair restoration is that we transplant your own hair follicles, one by one, from areas that have a good supply into areas where your hair is thinning.

One of the first reasons why we want you to get started with FUE sooner rather than later is that it’s important that you still have viable hair follicles that we can transplant, usually from the back and sides of your scalp.

Additionally, once an area of your scalp loses all hair and becomes shiny, it’s a little more challenging to get hair follicles to integrate, as the blood supply in your scalp may have waned due to follicle inactivity. The shiny skin is also considered scar tissue, which is tougher to work with from our perspective.

That said, it’s more important that you have donor hair follicles in numbers that we can work with. FUE does work with later-stage hair loss, but there may be more hurdles.

FUE treatments are less extensive during early hair loss

Another great reason for early FUE treatments to address hair loss is that your treatment schedule and time commitment will be less extensive if we can intervene early. 

We perform FUE hair transplantation using a micropunch tool to remove your hair follicles, then we make small incisions in your scalp where we insert the donor hair follicles. The more we need to move, the longer your sessions will be and the more work we have to do to transfer follicles from one area of your scalp to another.

By starting treatment early on, we won’t have to move as many hair follicles, and you can get through the FUE process more quickly and comfortably. This will get you to your great results sooner, as well.

To explore whether the time is right for FUE to address your hair loss, it’s a good idea to sit down with one of our hair transplant specialists. To get the ball rolling, please contact one of our conveniently located offices in Las Vegas or Henderson, Nevada, or St. George, Utah, to schedule a consultation.