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Patients that have a hair transplant often fear what people would call “shock loss”
or hair loss, which is a shedding of hair after the surgery. Now, some people call this
telogen effluvium, but it may be more correctly called an antigen effluvium. And this is a
result of hair loss that occurs after the physical trauma of the transplant. In most
instances, in almost all instances, after the shedding that takes place, these hairs
will come back. As long as the hairs were strong, they’ll come back. You can have
an antigen effluvium that occurs around the donor site, and it can actually occur in up
to 5 to 10% of the patients that experience the transplant. It depends on the strength
of the hair follicles. If they’re miniaturized, and they’re on their way out, they may never
come back. But in most instances, if they’re relatively strong, they will come back, and
patients don’t have to fear about that. Patients often ask, “When is the best time
to have the transplant?” Well, if you wait until you’re completely bald in that area,
certainly you won’t have any shock loss or any fall out; however, everyone will know
you’ve had a transplant. So you have to weigh out the pluses and minuses, and decide
for yourself which is the best treatment option. But know that there are certain things that
we can do to minimize this fall out after the hair transplant. One of these things is
using um, the laser postoperatively; another is that we use copper peptide solutions and
soaks. These things are both beneficial to reducing that, along with good technique using
small instruments and very careful anesthetics to get the best possible result and to minimize
the feared “shock loss.”