When to Consider Body Hair Transplantation: Conventionally, hair restoration is performed with grafts from the head. This can be quite ideal if the candidate has enough follicles on their scalp to replenish areas of thinning or baldness and greatly improve coverage. However, not everyone fits this profile. Therefore, body hair transplantation may be considered as an option for expanding the donor resources to include quantities needed for meeting the patient’s vision.

When to Consider Body Hair Transplantation: Patients Who Will Most Likely Benefit From the Use of Body Hair Grafts

Again, if the patient does not have enough follicles on their head to create the type of coverage that is wanted or needed, consider UGraft body hair transplantation for additional grafts. Here are several examples:

Moderate or severely bald patients. In these cases, a large portion of follicles have already miniaturized and stopped growing hair.
Individuals who need large scale hair transplant repair procedures. After every surgery where hair is replaced by transferring follicles from the head, the number of available grafts on the scalp declines, making it difficult to correct unwanted results.
body hair transplants can be beneficial in patients with thinning forms of androgenic alopecia such as DUPA or DPA

Hair thinning in pattern baldness is also due to the shrinkage of hair follicles. In DUPA (diffuse unpatterned alopecia) and DPA (diffuse patterned alopecia), miniaturization has affected a significant number of the follicles on the head, leaving very minimal quantities of usable head donor grafts.

Caution should be taken when performing body hair transplantation or other type of restoration surgery for patients with DUPA or DPA. Many of them have very sensitive hair follicles which may be easily traumatized when creating slits for receiving the new grafts. As a result, these structures may lose hair in a situation called shock loss. Dr U institutes measures to minimize the risk of shock loss in his patients.

Body Hair Transplantation And The Consideration of Donor Counts

Prospective patients need to be aware that the maximum numbers of grafts which can safely be removed from the head (in strip or Follicular Unit Extraction) ranges from 5,000-7,000.

Therefore, if they would need to find out how many grafts would be needed to meet their goals. If this quantity exceeds the maximum range from the scalp, body hair transplantation may be something to consider.

With the right tools like uGraft, it is actually quite possible to create donor sizes up to 25,000 grafts.

Successful results would ultimately depend on the survival of the body hair grafts as well as the skill used in inserting them. The main objective would lie in recreating natural patterns of growth. Textural discrepancies can be addressed by inserting head hair along with the body hair.

When to Consider Body Hair Transplantation: Skillfully applied body hair transplantation can produce amazing results*

Large case series study of body hair transplant findings publication in the ASJ

Dr U’s publication on Body hair transplants in the annals of plastic surgery