FUE Hair Transplant For Asian Patients

1. Hair shafts in Asian patients, taken from the head are quite thick. Using head hair as donors to restore hair and  reconstruct the anterior hairline would not produce a natural looking result. Therefore it is best to extract nape or leg hair follicles which can give the softness of a natural hairline.

2. Although this may seem counter intuitive, hair density in Asian patients is relatively very low.  Quantitatively, there are fewer hairs per square centimeter compared to whites or African Americans. This means that the donor supply from the head is rather limited.  Asian candidates for FUE  hair transplant must have a donor region that is “vast and scattered.” This will help prevent the area from looking depleted after the procedure.

Aside from these challenges, hair follicles from Asian patients tend to have higher survival rates and lower transection rates because they are thick and straight.

Overall, FUE transplant is an ideal choice in contrast to strip surgery for patients of Asian descent. Scarring and the development of keloids is a major risk for this ethnic group. Since a scalpel is not used in FUE, this is not a concern.

Also, in strip surgery, hair is taken from the back of the head, which yields very thick hair shafts that would not be a good match for hairline restoration around the face.  In Follicular Unit Extraction, donor hair is not limited to the head, but can be extracted from other areas of the body that would best suit the end result. Again, in Asian patients, nape and leg hair are ideal matches for replicating natural looking hairlines.

FUE transplant procedures offer more possibilities for customizing techniques to effectively restore hair in ethnic groups as well as  severely bald candidates, and patients who want to fix outcomes from past surgeries.