- Business Insider
UK spoke to trichologist Shirley MacDonald about possible cures for baldness. - Hair transplants don't cure baldness but do provide a good cover.
- There are a few other products that can prevent baldness but they must be taken continuously.
Read the full transcript below:
Shirley MacDonald: Transplants are getting much better. I mean 20-30 years ago when you had a transplant they looked like dolls hair. Now you can have them put in individually by the surgeon or even robots are putting them in, and they take them from the back of the scalp and they take them in a mosaic pattern and then re-transplant them.
Once it's transplanted it would camouflage that area, but really it doesn't cure baldness it's just going to be a coverage, and that hair would continue to grow because it's not androgen sensitive so unlike the hair on the top of the head, on the frontal area but you would then probably need, or your surgeon would need to look at how you're going to look in 10 years from the first transplant to sort of fill in those other areas. So you may need top-ups from the first transplant.
There are lots of things on the market that claim to grow hair, caffeine shampoos, I've seen them all the only thing that's licensed and that we know will work for a large proportion of people is topical minoxidil in different strengths for men and women and that's applied and that stops, slows down, it holds the hair in the growing phase much longer.
Something else that's licensed is Propicia which is an oral tablet that only men can take. The only disadvantage with these is that once you start, you have to continue otherwise you will lose the hair once you stop, both of these treatments.
we are always on the lookout for cure's for baldness that research never stops it's really, really important. But I think we're going to look towards genetic engineering in the future.
If we've I think that's probably the most likely solution to baldness. But the research doesn't stop, it's ongoing all the time, so yes there's still hope out there.
Produced by Charlie Floyd