Becoming bald is one of the most devastating things that can happen to anybody's life. Loss of hair comes as a shock, trauma, and stress to most people. If someone gives you hope that there is a remedy for baldness it seems nothing short of a miracle. This miraculous remedy is the hair transplant procedure. In this procedure, a dermatologist or plastic surgeon moves hair from healthy hair areas to a bald area of the head. Usually, the hair transplant surgeons take the healthy hair from the back of the head and move them to the front of the head. The area where the doctors pick the hair is called the donor area and the place where they are planted is called the recipient area.
Having understood this we should know that there are two methods of doing this. FUT and FUE.
The FUT method -
the full form of FUT is Follicular unit transplantation. Now, what is a hair follicle? Hair is formed of a tough protein called keratin. And the follicle is that part of a single hair that holds or anchors the hair into the skin. In the FUT method hair-bearing skin is taken in the form of a strip from the donor area and grafted in the recipient area. The skin patches thus taken are divided into a number of grafts and then transplanted. A drawback is that a linear scar remains in the donor area from where the skin is extracted. About a decade ago this method was used more widely because the FUE method was not developed at that time. There is also a limitation on how many grafts can be done in one session- which is about 1000 to 1500 in the FUT transplant. This number is insufficient to show good results in most patients. Hence FUT technique requires more grafts in subsequent sessions. Moreover, this hikes up the cost of getting a hair transplant. Thirdly, the skin patch grafts take considerable time to fully heal. These drawbacks of the FUT method were successfully eliminated when the FUE technique came into the picture about a decade ago.
The FUE method –
The full form of FUE is Follicular unit extraction. This is the current most widely used method of hair transplantation. This technique involves extracting each hair follicle rather than the skin, to transplant them individually in the bald area. Hence, there is no sewing and stitching involved. Doctors shave the hair at the donor area and then the follicles are removed by a method called punching. These follicles are then grafted. Particularly ever since the surgeons have started using the micro- motor to extract grafts, a big breakthrough has been brought in hair transplantation. Prior to the micr- motor use, manual punching was used to extract the grafts. It took 3-4 hours to extract 2000 grafts manually. Presently, the micro-motor has made it possible for the operators to transplant 5000- 6000 grafts in one hour. It mostly requires only one session mostly for the whole transplant. Secondly, the healing time is reduced to a great extent- from 1-2 weeks in FUT to 2-3 days in FUE. Also, it is a scarless and stitchless surgery. Another plus point is that it is very practical to adopt in cases where the patient is very young and only has thinning and partial balding. Extracted follicles are used to densify the hair in that case.
A decade ago, ever since the FUE technique for hair transplantation has come into practice, the doctors recommend and prefer it over the FUT technique. it proves to be more economical and faster with a much smaller healing period. Moreover it is can also be used for restoring smaller areas like eyelashes and moustaches.
