Are you waiting to get a full head of hair transplanted using cloned hairs? Want to get a soft, undetectable new hairline using the latest innovation in hair restoration? These topics as well as others were discussed at a scientific session on new ideas and recent innovations in hairloss and hair transplantation at the 7^th annual meeting of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery (ISHRS).

The Current Status of Cloning Hair
Walter P. Unger, MD

Dr. Unger has been working with other doctors at the University of Toronto to culture (also known as cloning) hair follicles to try to get many hairs from one.  They have been working in mice, injecting the cultured follicles into mice in an attempt to get them to grow.  So far they have been able to culture all the cell types found in the hair follicles and are experimenting with different combinations of the necessary cells, but they have only been able to get hairs to grow briefly and not in all the mice. Dr. Unger believes that it is inevitable that hair culturing will be perfected in the near future.

One of the reasons for the slow progress according to Dr. Unger is the regulatory approval that has to be obtained to do these kinds of expiriments.  It took 6 months to get approval just to be able to do studies on the mice and they do not yet have approval to do testing in humans.

Women Lose Hair – Only Differently
O’Tar T. Norwood, MD

Most doctors believe that male hairloss and female hairloss are the same disease even though they have a different appearance.  However, recent studies have shown that they are different in the fact that females metabolize male and female hormones differently. Females also have a different distribution of androgen receptors on the scalp, which are the areas of the scalp that the male hormones have to 'bind' to.

Dr. Norwood believes they are two completely different genetic conditions. He sites as evidence the fact that females given testosterone injections develop male pattern hairloss and not typical female pattern loss. Normal men can also get female style hairloss. Dr. Norwood has traced the geneology of one family of a patient that has a prevalence of both female and male pattern hairloss and believes it shows that female pattern loss is a separate inherited condition from male pattern hairloss.

Hair Transplant vs. Finasteride in Identical Twins
Natural Hair Transplant Medical Center, Newport Beach, CA

This presentation studied the hair growth results two identical twins got on finasteride/Propecia and for one in combination with hair transplants.  The two twins had identical hairloss patterns between Norwood 4 and 5.  After ten months on Propecia, there was a moderate improvement in both to almost a Norwood 3V.  After two surgeries and about 2,500 grafts, the twin who received hair transplants was a Norwood 1-2 with a little thinning remaining at the crown.

• Propecia Shows Continued Results (ISHRS)