Evolution of FUE vs. FUT Grafts in Hair Transplant Surgery

This audio podcast has been transcribed using an automated service. Please forgive any typographic errors or other transcription flaws.

I am here with my hair transplant coordinator, Emina, Vance, formerly married, Emina Karamanovski, but we stopped that because it was too long. A name now actually she’s happily married and awesome. We’ve done a podcast before on I think some critical thinking of graft quality, other elements of that. I really, you know, part of the big trend now is fue. We’ve been doing that for many years now. Just as a plug for my new book coming out in about a year from now, it’s the only book in the world that I’ve already written. The next one will be the only book. That’ll be a double volume on fue, but there’s really been a huge improvement in graft quality for fue grafts. Could you, part of the big thing was the hybrid punch in, and what’s going on. Can you talk a little about what you’re seeing with these fue grafts over the last, let’s say five years?

So in the past, what I noticed with the grafts, it was that they didn’t have enough tissue around the hair follicles, like a hair roots to protect the hair and help us survive better. So now with different punches, we have more tissue. So the hair root is protected better. The second thing that I notice is the improvement of the rotation versus oscillation on a punch change where in the past with a high rotation, like sometimes even robot did that. The punch would spin the hair follicles and damage them and strip the protective layer that runs through the entire hair shaft, today with the new instruments that they are also lading, they’re slightly shaking through the tissue, desecting grafts without damaging the hair follicles. So the improvement in ther appearance of the hair follicle and another thing that I notice is we are storing them in solution that allows better survival of the hair follicles. And then when we are placing them, it’s much easier to hold the graft in or using implanters protects the graft. But the idea behind it is that once the graft comes out of the skin is more robust and then it’s stored in a solution that minimizes the stress and then the way we handle and when we are placing it makes a huge difference in graft survival. So from several years ago to today, we are seeing almost close survival rate between fue and fut graft. [Inaudible]

And some of the recent studies have actually shown a similar if not the same survival of both of them. I think there are still some advantages to the stripper Fut grafts. Could you talk a little about what you’re seeing with FUT grafts?

So there’s a fat layer that is surrounding hair follicle. It’s like a dirt. If you would pull a tree out of the ground, they will be a dirt protecting the roots. And that protects the tree to survive in a similar way. There’s a fat layer that protects hair follicles. So in FUT we can preserve that fat layer around the hair follicles in fue Inevitably when the hair graft is pulled out of the tissue that fat is detached from the hair root. So the F UT grafts because of that fat layers have a little bit of better survival, especially during the implantation. They’re getting close fue to fut grafts, but we can control how much tissue we can have around the hair shaft and how much fat layer we have around the hair follicles, or hair roots.

So that improves the graft survival. Another thing that I see as a difference is in fue grafts hair that come out of the skin or cut short. So it’s harder to see hair curl versus the fut graft. So when the hair comes out of the skin, it curls looking in, in the hairline hair for faces forward. When we go to the donor area here, faces back to where the back of the body. So when it’s transplanted, we have to rotate that curl to make it look natural. So, which means when the graft is placed inside of the incision, the hair curls should be facing toward the sculpt. So when we do FUT procedure, the donor strip is trimmed with leaving hair long enough, so that the hair curl is obvious. In fue procedure, the hair has to be shared to a very short hair stubble, which is one to two millimeters in sometimes hair curl is difficult to see. So when the grafts are placed in, there’s a way to determine the hair curl, but inexperienced person may not see it because it’s not as obvious. Yes. So there’s advantage of FUT gives advantages in a hair curl. So it’s easier to make natural result with FUT.

And I just want to give a plug for Emina and the team because they have years of experience doing this in terms of grafts placement. So the hair curl is more distinct on an F U T graft, but they have a lot of experience being able to tell the way that the hair curl is aimed, even with the shortened, fue grafts because of the slant of the epidermal cap, or in other words, the top of the skin. And I welcome you to look at my or listen to my podcast on the hair curl. Anything else to add Eina? Nope. Okay, good. This is just a short podcast on understanding the quality of FUE and FUT graft, especially the evolution of those grafts over the last few years.