Whether it’s David Beckham or Prince William, when a celebrity is losing their hair it becomes a hot topic of conversation. The latest involves Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney and his recent twitter announcement that he underwent hair transplant surgery. From the photos, Rooney seemed to be experiencing androgenetic alopecia, or common male pattern baldness, and that led him to treat his hair loss with a hair transplant.
The clinic in London, where he had the surgical procedure performed, specializes in the Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) method of hair transplantation. In an FUE hair transplant, naturally-occurring groups of hairs — called follicular units — are extracted one at a time from the back of the scalp (called the donor area). The follicular units are then transplanted into recipient sites made in the balding area, where they take root and grow new hairs.
Follicular units can also be removed from the scalp in a method, called strip harvesting, in which a thin strip of skin is removed from the person’s donor area. The follicular units are then dissected from the strip and implanted in the recipient area. This procedure is called a Follicular Unit Transplant (FUT).
The FUE procedure allows a person to wear his or her hair a bit shorter and to resume strenuous physical activities sooner compared to FUT, although there are some drawbacks. In general, the results of FUT will be more full, since the quality of grafts, obtained through microscopic dissection, will be heartier and generally have better survival than with FUE.
A celebrity hair transplant may indeed be newsworthy, but it is also a good time to learn about state-of-the-art hair transplantation and why so many men and women are turning to it as a way to treat their hair loss.
You can read a great deal more about the procedure by visiting the links above, the Bernstein Medical Hair Transplant Blog, or our Before and After Hair Transplant Photo Galleries.
Try our Photo Consultation form to have a hair loss consultation with Dr. Bernstein.
