Millions saw the Irish golfer Shane Lowry easily winning the British Open Golf Championship at Portrush in Northern Ireland at the weekend.
Lowry won by a six shots from the UK’s Tommy Fleetwood to land his first major title.
The 32-year-old Irishman has fairly advanced male pattern baldness, as the picture below indicates.
He is losing his hair heavily at the temples and on top of his crown.
Lowry is an excellent candidate for a hair transplant.
The star makes millions from his image rights and sponsorship deals with big brands such as Bank of Ireland.
He would look years younger and provide a more vibrant image to those sponsors by restoring his lost hair.
Like most men who suffer from advanced male pattern baldness at a relatively young age, Lowry has a strong baldness gene running in his family.
His father, the former Gaelic football star Brendan Lowry, 60, is almost completely bald – and Shane risks the same fate if he does not take action now.
He faces three options:
1 FUE (follicular unit extraction) hair transplant – this is the most popular procedure at Crown Clinic. Around 80% of the patients of our consultant hair transplant surgeon Asim Shahmalak opt for FUE.
With FUE, the donor hairs are removed individually from the back and side of the scalp. This means that patients only suffer minimal scarring – normally some red pin pricks where the donor hair is extracted and replanted which go away after a few weeks..
FUE patients don’t even have to shave most of the scalp to obtain the donor hair. Dr Shahmalak has perfected a new technique called Long-Haired FUE where only a small strip of skin is shaved to obtain the donor hair.
The long hair above this shaved strip then falls over the strip, making it difficult to see following surgery.
Dr Shahmalak used this method on the recent FUE transplant carried out on the Coronation Street star Jack P Shepherd. Jack didn’t want his head shaved because he needed to maintain continuity in his role of David Platt in Corrie. Other well known Crown Clinic celebrity hair transplant patients include the model Calum Best, Googlebox star Chris Butland-Steed, former footballer Didi Hamann and Homes Under The Hammer presenter Martin Roberts.
2 FUT (follicular unit transplantation) hair transplant – this is the more traditional form of hair transplantation, still chosen by around 20% of Dr Shahmalak’s patients at Crown Clinic. With FUT, a strip of skin is surgically removed from the back or side of the scalp to obtain the donor hair. Because the scarring on this strip is visible, FUT is not suitable for patients who like to wear their hair short or shaved. The advantage of FUT is that it is less labour intensive than FUE and therefore slightly cheaper. The TV doctor Christian Jessen has had two FUT transplants with Dr Shahmalak.
3 The third option Shane Lowry has is to limit further hair loss by taking a clinically proven hair loss product such as Finasteride, also known as Propecia. This won’t help Shane to grow any new hair but it should slow down or halt his natural hair loss. Dr Shahmalak often recommends drugs such as Finasteride which can be prescribed alongside a hair transplant, so the patient has a two-pronged approach (both surgical and medicinal) to combat male pattern baldness. Another clinically proven hair loss drug is Minoxidil which can be taken as a mousse which is spread on the hair.
Any one of these three treatments would have a positive benefit on Shane Lowry’s hair. It will be interesting to see whether he copies the actions of a lot of other high profile sportsmen, not least Wayne Rooney, and chooses to address this issue.