Micro Hair Trauma, Survival, and How ATP Has Helped my Hair Restoration Procedures
I started using so-called regenerative medicine in 2011, which are essentially “fertilizers” for hair growth. I have been blown away by the improvements in my outcomes and am still baffled at surgeons who use no technological support for their outcomes. My improvement in results was so striking that it compelled me to rewrite my entire published textbook a mere 4 years after the first edition was published. The number one reason for my impetus to write the second edition of the book was due to the advent of these technological breakthroughs. I started using PRP and ACell in 2011 and then in 2014 I added ATP and HypoThermosol to the equation.
The use of ATP/HypoThermosol taught me many valuable lessons. When I started to look at my results I noticed that I oftentimes saw hair growth as early as 3 months, which I had never seen before. When I was performing hair transplant just alone with no “fertilizers” I was seeing about 6 to 8 months before I saw any early growth. When I added PRP and ACell, I started to see oftentimes substantial growth as early as 5 to 6 months. Now with ATP and HypoThermosol I oftentimes see early growth at 3 to 4 months and more substantive growth from 4 to 6 months. Of course, everyone has varying results and sometimes I don’t see any substantial growth until 10 to 12 months but this is less likely.
Besides earlier hair growth I started to notice more even growth and, here’s the kicker, finer hair growth, that looked more attractive. When you have an inexperienced hair-transplant team place grafts, the grafts can grow out kinky and resemble pubic hair. My staff is one of the most experienced placers out there with my lead placer, Emina, lecturing across the world and writing extensively on quality control. Accordingly, our grafts look excellent and have very little mechanical damage to them. However, now that I see how grafts look after the application of ATP/HypoThermosol I believe that even in the most experienced hands there can be some level of micro trauma during graft insertion that is corrected by the ATP/HypoThermosol.
How ATP works is that it stabilizes the Na-K-ATP pump found in the cellular membrane. By making sure that this pump remains functional, the cell won’t explode with the incursion of fluid from the outside environment. HypoThermosol is a very expensive fluid medium that is used for delicate organ transplants that is also enlisted to ensure graft viability. A colleague of mine found that placing grafts into chilled ATP/HypoThermosol solution for 2 weeks allowed a 96% survival in grafts where in normal saline all the grafts would be dead at 24 hours sitting outside of the body. In addition, these grafts stored in ATP/HypoThermosol were transplanted into an irradiated scalp, where blood supply was poor, and the grafts grew exceptionally better than grafts stored in normal saline. Today, I believe that ATP is an essential ingredient to my hair transplants. No way can you substitute these products for quality work but today I believe that quality work without these products can’t be considered quality anymore.