Is Fue Or Fut Better For Restoring Frontal Hair Loss?

[wallyandre]

Hello all. Been losing my hair and reading the message boards for a while and have a question I was hoping someone could clear up. My hairline has been receding very slowly for the past ten years. It is now starting to thin pretty rapidly. I met with one doctor to talk about a hair transplant. He said he would suggest an FUE to bring the hairline forward. He said if I lose more hair, he could do another transplant (and make it look like I am just balding in the back a bit) or get hair replacement system for the back. When I went to a different doctor, he suggested a FUT transplant from the front, and said he thought my hair loss was very gradual. However, he basically suggested the same as the first doctor if I were to lose my hair. I will not take propecia. My question is, do you think FUE or FUT is better for the front, and if it looks like I will lose the rest of my hair, is getting a hair transplant a bad choice? Also, can you mix a hair transplant with a “wig” and make it look natural?

 

[Roberto_72]

FUT is an older technique. I would not do it again as today FUE has been perfected a lot since the first days. Some surgeons do not suggest FUE as it is more work and less gain for them.

 

[dr. cole]

I have performed over 8000 FUT procedures and over 6000 FUE procedures. I would say hands down that FUE is superior. I noted that Roberto 72 mentioned that FUE has progressed quite a bit since the early days. That's true. We figured it out, but not so true because many FUE surgeons live in a bubble, which means if your fit their paradigm, you will do well. If you do not, you will have a poor result. One must have a wide arsenal of options available to succeed in FUE. If your surgeon does not have them, you might be better off having someone do FUT. Having said this, great FUE avoids strip scars, prolonged tightness in the donor area, donor hair growth angle changes, and thin results. Many offer FUE today, but not great FUE. Many hire unskilled doctors to do their FUE or unlicensed nurses to do FUE. Others use a Robot to do FUE. All including unskilled doctors, unlicensed nurses, and robots are prone to very poor results and bad donor scarring. In such instances, you are better off with a skilled FUT surgeon. Having stated this, you must also find a well trained FUT surgeon. If you want the optimal result, you should find a highly skilled FUE surgeon. That's the best option to avoid all the complications of FUT. You will read that some consider FUT superior to FUE. None of those promoting such nonsense are good at FUE. Thus, this is the first criteria to exclude these surgeons from your procedure. If they remotely suggest FUT, this is a sign to get up and walk out of the room. Find a 100% FUE doctor with many great results and that is where you begin your search. Find a few and pick the one that you get along with the best. Above all, get a great result and let us know how it turns out. Between 2003 and 2010, I was the only one on the message boards promoting FUE. It is so nice to come back now and find that patients are promoting FUE. Great FUE is far superior to any FUT procedure especially if you use an Acell gel in the extraction sites to get an average of 48% of extraction sites that cannot be found often due to follicle regeneration.

 

[dr. cole]

The one thing that no FUT surgeon has acknowledged yet is that strips kill donor hair through traction. We have proven this in studies looking at density, diameter, follicular unit density, and cross sectional trichometery. Traction alopecia is well recognized everywhere other than the donor area and strips cause traction alopecia. Furthermore, strips (FUT) decrease the cross sectional trichometery far more than FUE. We now that cross sectional trichometery is a measure of density and diameter. Following surgery, the diameter remains the same, but hair density decreases far more with FUT than with FUE. The bottom line is that FUT kills hair. Thus, avoid FUT at all cost.