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Home > Hair Loss > Hair Loss Treatment Solution > Hair Transplant Surgery
How Are Follicular Units Used in Hair Transplant Surgery?
Certain doctors have been aware of
follicular units for a long time now, but the
knowledge only recently made its way into hair
transplant methods. Now these ideas are being used
in hair restoration every day.
To understand how follicular units have affected
hair transplant surgery practices, it is necessary
to first understand what a follicular unit is. A
follicular unit is a single entity that is made up
of several parts. All these parts are necessary to
the whole.
The first part, and the one most people getting hair transplant surgery are interested in, is the hairs. There should be one to four full hair follicles in the unit and one or two fine hairs as well. There are sebaceous glands in the follicular unit which produce oil.
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The follicular unit is a living unit with muscle,
nerves and blood vessels that are all tiny enough to
fit into this small package. The unit is set off by
a band of collagen that holds it together. If you
look under a microscope at a scalp, you can see
follicular units growing in just this way.
The idea of bringing this information into hair
transplant procedures led to innovative surgical
methods. Rather than just moving around individual
hair follicles, surgeons actually moved a unit which
contained everything the hair needed to keep
growing. The results were ground-breaking.
One way surgeons used to move the donor follicular
units to the balding areas was by single strip
harvesting. This is done by moving small strips of
tissue containing follicular units. This method
keeps the units intact and ready to transplant.
Earlier methods such as mini-grafting and
micro-grafting broke up the follicular units.
As a part of the hair transplant process with
Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT), a new
microscope technique was used. It is called
stereomicroscopic dissection. This means that the
follicular units are carefully taken out of the
donor tissue and kept individually intact.
When doctors use hair transplant procedures with FUT,
they do not have to use quite as large of a donor
site. The follicular units are small and they can be
separated from tissue that has no hair, under the
microscope. That way, only the tissue that grows
hair is transplanted. It is a much more efficient
procedure in that way.
Follicular units placed during hair transplant
procedures are put into tiny holes the size of
needles. The insertion sites heal quickly, and they
leave no marks. This makes for a much more
comfortable recovery and better results.
FUT hair transplant procedures can make a big
difference in the number of times a patient will
have to go back for more treatments. More grafts can
be done at one session, so that the patient has to
go back fewer times. This is more convenient to
patients.
Hair transplant done using follicular unit
procedures is becoming more and more the norm.
Possibly this is because it puts hair into the scalp
in the same arrangement as it grows there naturally.
This represents a leap forward in hair transplant
technology.
