Male and female pattern alopecia, commonly known as baldness, is a common problem to many. Its causes range from heredity to stress patterns. It can also be noticed that men have a large area of baldness while women suffer thinning hair instead of a complete loss.
According to statistics, about 80% of all men suffer from noticeable hair loss by the age of 80 while about 50% of all women suffer from it. That means that more than half of the population is affected with baldness and may also their children can also be affected with the condition. Since it is a large-scale problem, scientists and doctors have tried multiple ways of solving it; and hair transplant history has proven that as time goes by, the available treatments improve further.
A Brief Timeline of Hair Transplant
It is important to review the evolution of surgical hair restoration because it provides the progression of simple ideas to the profound techniques surgeons are doing now. Briefly, let us take a look at how hair transplant surgery developed.
- 1939—A Japanese dermatologist named Dr. Okuda tried to graft hair on the scarred areas of his severely burned patients and found out that the grafted hair can grow on the new location. His discovery made it to a medical journal but was not paid much attention because it was the time of World War II.
- 1959—Two decades after, Dr. Norman Orentreich published his work using almost the same ideas as that of Dr. Okuda. His method was that a donor area (which is located primarily in the side and back of the head) can be harvested and then transplanted to the bald areas.
- 90s—The 90s provided a closer look in improving the techniques used before. Surgeons began to use follicular units as grafts. The procedure provided a more natural look.
It is also important to note that the transplants before looked like “corn rows” or “doll’s hair” because the arrangements of the grafts are too far apart. Thanks to modern technology, the grafts can be placed in such a way that they are closer together, yet they do not cross each other.
What is in Store for the Future of Hair Transplant
According to a hair loss association, hair cloning and hair multiplication is becoming more and more developed today. Hair multiplication is the process of growing more hair so that there will be no need for extracting from donor sites. On the other hand, the hair cloning process includes manipulation of the cells of the hair so that they can be able to promote growth of new and healthy hair. The idea came from Dolly the sheep, the first animal to be cloned.