Hi, after 4 months my transplants are now starting to grow, so I'll add some comments here which I think are valid.
Facial team may recommend transplanting the strip of skin left over once they've performed forehead work via their coronal incision, but this needs to take into account the amount of male pattern baldness. If it's pronounced, perhaps the follicles in the strip might be too suceptible to DHT and therefore they won't recommend it.
Something which no transplant surgeon talks about is the donor site scar, and they should. I had a FUSS transplant in Spain about 6 months after FFS - around 1,800 transplants, so around 5,000 hairs - €7,500. The front is going to look great in a few months, but the back is another story, so here's the bit where you need to be careful : the stitching to close up the donor site is quite a business. Surgeons offer a technique whereby hair eventually grows through the scar, but this makes a very strong assumption - that the scar holds together once stitches are removed. If the tension in the scalp is very high, once stitches are removed the skin can stretch, and the resulting skin is both thin and devoid of hair. That's what happened in my case. A beautiful hairline in front and some hairless patches in the occipital region. On speaking to my aesthetic doctor she told me it was actually fairly common but generally not explained by transplant surgeons. To fix it one can get micro pigmentation, where they basically tattoo the skin in a colour similar to your hair. Obviously it has an immediate benefit, but it pretty much obliges you to keep to a similar hair colour for ever. The better solution is to ensure that the surgeon takes a small graft, or in some way ensures that post-surgery tension in the scalp is kept "low". The crescent of skin taken from my scalp was 2cm high in the middle - that's a lot of skin to close afterwards, and a lot of tension to bear.
I have heard that Turkey is doing some spectacular things in terms of hair transplant, so it's worth investigating. Don't expect it to be very cheap however, as Istanbul is almost as expensive as many European citites.
In terms of halting existing hair loss, both Androcur and Finasteride are good, but they appear to work slightly differently. Finasteride appears to target DHT, which is considered to have a stronger effect on suceptible follicles than testosterone. But both are toxic to the liver. If you do take either of these you need to perform a couple of liver function tests duting the first 4-6 months and then it is prudent to take a liver function test every 6-12 months. Since estrogen is already placing more burden on the liver, it's important to deal with this holistically.
I'm happy to answer any specifics on my hair transplant process. Truly, FFS was easier, less complicated and healed faster, believe that if you can!
Hugs
Julia
