Female Hair Transplant With No Results After One Year - What Do I Do?

Written by H. Rahal, MD on July 30, 2008

I am a 32 year old woman and got a hair transplant surgery a year ago. The front of hairline has always had fine baby hair compared to the rest of my hair. It doesn’t fall out, it is just fine. I got the surgery to make that hair look fuller. After my 6 month progress checkup there was no growth, after a year I don’t notice a difference and the before and after photos look the same. I asked my doctor about it and explained my dissatisfaction and he said that I don’t see a difference because the grafted hair is growing but my normal hair is falling out so I don’t see a difference. I think it is a bit strange that everything was the same, no notice of hair loss at the 6 month checkup and then all of the sudden the grafted hair grows my other hair falls out etc. It sounds like an excuse but when I confronted my doctor, he says, I’m the trained doctor and that’s what happened. I know my hair didn’t suddenly start falling out at accelerated speed in the last 6 months. How do approach this, there is no way to undo going through all of the procedure etc. How do I communicate this better to my doctor…because I think I should get a refund or something because it didn’t work. ~ Sima
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Investing time, energy and money into a hair transplant procedure and ending with an outcome that doesn’t meet your goals can be quite frustrating. But gauging results, after transplanting into areas with existing hair, can be difficult especially with the variable of shock loss.

So lets analyze the situation: you are now one-year post surgery into the hairline, which had fine miniaturized hair. You don’t see new “transplanted” hair and the before/after pictures confirm this. Meanwhile your doctor’s explanation is not satisfying.

I am assuming that there are no other medical issues and causes for your hair loss other than normal female pattern baldness. I am also assuming that you followed the post op instructions carefully as advised by the treating physician.

There are two possible explanations to your situation:

One being that the transplanted hair did grow but there was enough shock loss.

Second is the transplanted hair did not grow and the hair you see now is the previous native ones. Normally transplanted hair will have a different texture and possibly a darker color from miniaturized hair. This should be easy to see upon examination. Your current amount of hair in the hairline is unlikely to be the new transplanted hairs if those hairs look and feel the same as the native miniaturized hairs. This does not mean that transplanted hair cannot look so natural as native mature hair

Your option now is to seek advice from another experienced hair transplant surgeon. This second opinion may shed some light and help to either reassure you that the new hairs are in fact transplanted hairs or alternatively the surgery was a failure. If the latter is the case then requesting a partial refund is in order.

H. Rahal, MD
Member, International Alliance of Hair Restoration Surgeons
Member, American Hair Loss Association

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