As little as a year ago, a hair transplant would have been out of the question for Ryan Wells.

“I’m only 42, and I had slight thinning of the hair, so the idea of cutting the scalp for a traditional hair transplant was never a consideration,” he said.

As a real estate agent whose success relies on an image of vigor, he said, “We all want to look younger, and my wife said, ‘You’ve got to do something about your hair.’ It was something I couldn’t see. Us guys, we’re not looking at the back of our heads.”

So he started doing some research and learned that Dr. Shim Ching’s Asia Pacific Plastic Surgery is the first and only clinic in the state using the ARTAS Robotic System for hair restoration, adopting it early this year, and Wells was game to try it.

The ARTAS system uses a computer-assisted robotic arm and digital mapping of the head to harvest healthy hair follicles, typically from the back of the head, to implant where needed. 

Following five years of clinical studies to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of the system, the ARTAS Robotic System was cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2011.

Ching called the ARTAS system a “game changer” that doesn’t involve invasive cutting of the scalp, which is good news for those experiencing hair loss. 

According to Ching, two-thirds of American men will have some degree of hair loss by age 35, and by the age of 50, 85 percent will experience noticeable thinning of hair on top. 

“A lot of men in the workforce are getting older and finding themselves competing with younger men, so they feel they need to look the part,” said Ching, whose clientele ranges in age from their mid-20s to 70s. “Losing their hair does make men look older than they really are, so they’re seeking to improve things.”

Women are not immune to hair loss, and Ching says he sees many who come in seeking help for diffuse, or thinning, hair.

What the ARTAS system won’t do is transplant someone’s hair follicles to another person because the follicle will be rejected, just like any other foreign transplant.

During the procedure, patients sit with their head down, as if in a massage chair. Hair to be harvested is shaved to about one-eighth of an inch. After a local anesthetic is applied, the robotic arm rapidly targets healthy hairs, making a small cookie cutter-like incision around them, without damaging living follicles beneath the skin’s surface. 

Ching said this follicular unit extraction is the most critical step of the procedure. While hair often grows in curved trajectories, standard follicle unit extraction assumes hair growth occurs as a straight line and risks damaging the follicles during the excision of the grafts. Damaged follicles will not produce hair.

The robotic arm is also used to create the small puka that will receive the individual hair grafts, which cost $11 each. The procedure costs, on average, about $10,000 to $15,000 for fewer than 1,000 to 1,500 hairs. (The average person has about 100,000 hair follicles, about 100 per square centimeter.)

After the robotic work is done, human hands take over to remove the hairs with fine tweezers, count them and insert them one by one, like sowing seeds. The human eye is still needed to plant the individual hairs, following the direction of growth to create the most natural-looking results. The entire procedure takes up to eight hours, depending on how many individual hair follicles are transplanted.

Wells compared his scalp in process to an aerated putting green.

“They made all these little pukas, but I felt nothing, just the pressure when it punched down,”?he said. “I was talking to them the whole time, about restaurants, about our kids.

“They’re really like artists. If they needed to make more holes, they made more holes.”

Once the hair grafts are in place, the little bit of blood in each hole coagulates and holds them in place until capillaries are able to connect to the hair bulbs, providing nutrients for the growing hair. 

Patients are advised to avoid washing their hair for two days after the procedure and to avoid swimming for two weeks, but otherwise, Ching said it’s an in-and-out procedure that requires no downtime. Wells said he was sent home with painkillers but never used them.

Although individuals can feel and see the stubble of the transplanted hairs, Ching said it takes about eight months to a year to see the full results as the new hairs match the others in length.

Wells, who had hairs transplanted in March, said other men have already noticed the difference.

“They don’t see the scalp as much, and I have no problem telling them what I did. They’re all fascinated.”

Ching said it could be possible one day for the robot to isolate and remove white hairs.

“It could also be possible to replace the white hair follicle with a normally colored one,” he said, adding, “It may be easier to figure out why hair becomes white or gray with age and try to stop this process before it happens, and I do know research is being done on this.”

———

For more information, call 585-8855 or visit www.drshimching.com.