Does Dense Packing of Hair Follicles Affect the Survival Rate of Transplanted Hair?
Monday, October 6th, 2008
This article was just published last month in Dermatologic Surgery Journal. I thought the results should be interesting for the readers of this blog. The article title is Survival of densely packed follicular unit hair grafts using the lateral slit technique.
The authors, Nakatsui, Wong and Groot, describe their experiment on densely packed follicular hair units and follow up on the rate of survival of the transplanted hair. They use a density of 75 hairs per square centimeter which is even higher than the regular hair transplantation methods currently in use. 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.
Those 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.
This is true and some hair transplant surgeons still advocate the use of lower densities which make the patient commit to multiple surgeries. These hair transplant surgeons convince their patients that dense packing can negatively affect the circulation of the skin and jeopardize the rate of growth for implanted hair follicles.
The study was only done on one patient and needs to be experimented on a larger number of patients but this at least clarifies 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.
We do perform densepacking hair transplant surgery at the US Hair Restoration clinics in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills and Orange County in California on a regular basis.
