Another stroke of the hair, another handful of strands, and another visible patch of the scalp. If you are one of the 80 million US adults dealing with androgenetic alopecia (male and female pattern baldness), this scenario probably sounds all too familiar.
Going bald can be brutal, especially from a self-confidence and social interaction standpoint. According to one study, 29 percent of women with hair loss experience depression symptoms. Another reports that hair loss can create an enormous emotional burden for men.
But a new, natural therapy may offer more patients hope for hair restoration without surgery, pills, or topical ointments. Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) injection is a novel procedure that uses your own blood platelets—a type of cell that helps with healing throughout the body—to potentially reverse hair loss and grow new hair.
PRP for hair regrowth is a relatively new procedure, but it might be an option to help you look and feel like yourself again.
How Does PRP Work?
Though often associated with ageing and genetics, hair loss can happen at any time throughout adulthood. Balding occurs when the hair follicles, the small sacs that anchor individual hairs to the scalp, begin to shrink, allowing the hair to fall out.
In the world of sports medicine, doctors have used PRP to help heal muscle and tendon injuries. Research suggests that injecting the platelets found in a patient’s blood and activating growth factors can improve the blood supply to their hair follicles and increase the thickness of their hair shafts.
Before a PRP procedure, we will discuss realistic expectations with you. Improvement in hair health and thickness is possible and has been documented in several peer-reviewed studies. We will also talk about lifestyle choices that can affect hair loss, such as quitting smoking and eating a diet fortified with vitamin D and iron, two nutrients that might support hair growth.
For most people, the procedure only takes an hour or two, and you can both come home or go back to the office immediately afterward. Once the numbing effects of anaesthesia subside, you will experience some soreness at the site of the treatment. As with most pain, icing the injection area for 15 minutes, 2-3 times a day for the first few days will help ease the pain and inflammation. Most people experience noticeable improvement within a week or two and can resume normal activity.
Based on the results of the reviewed clinical studies, the use of PRP to treat AGA is promising. Safety issues, side effects, and downtime seem to be minimal. Although PRP does appear to be beneficial, the preparation, dosage, number, and interval of treatment sessions, as well as injection technique, vary between the studies due to a lack of standardisation of PRP preparation. This makes inferring conclusions about its clinical efficacy difficult. To further classify the effects of PRP on hair regrowth in AGA, randomized, placebo-controlled studies with larger sample sizes are needed. Such studies would need to report the frequency of injections, concentration of PRP, and include long-term follow-up to determine how long-term results are sustained. The optimal PRP preparation for AGA is still unknown and requires further investigation where PRP variables are reported.
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