Will my hair suffer from the harvesting of donor hair for a transplant?

Hair transplant procedures are very simple.

Hair is removed from an area of scalp where there is a permanent abundance of hair and transplanted to parts of the scalp which are balding.

No 'new' hair grafts are generated – they are just moved around to better effect. The principle is the same whether a patient is having a FUE (follicular unit extraction ) procedure or a FUT (follicular unit transplantation) procedure. These two methods are simply different ways of harvesting the donor hair. In both procedures, the transplanted hair is replanted in the scalp in the same way.

Some patients are concerned that, in extracting hair from the back or side of scalp, Crown Clinic's surgeon Asim Shahmalak  will create new areas of the scalp where the hair is thin.

The answer to this question is an emphatic NO.

Virtually all men suffering from male pattern baldness still keep a horseshoe of permanent hair around the back and sides of their scalp. They may lose their hair around the crown, midscalp, hairline and temples but, no matter how thin their hair is elsewhere on the scalp, this horsehoe will always remain. It gives hair transplant surgeons an abundance of 'extra' hair, if you like, to use to treat thinning areas elsewhere on the scalp.

It is why some patients can have more than one procedure without their donor areas at the back and sides of their scalp looking noticeably thinner. Calum Best, for instance, has had three FUE procedures at Crown Clinic. He has a full head of hair and there is no noticeable thinning in the areas where the hair has been transplanted or the donor areas, despite thousands and thousands of grafts being taken from the donor areas. Similarly Dr Christian Jessen has had two transplants at Crown Clinic using the FUT method – again, his hair remains abundant in the donor area and around his hairline where the harvested hair was moved.