Video Transcript
Hello everybody, it’s Dr. Vinay from Northwestern Hair. In today’s video I want to talk to you about shock loss, when to expect it, when to expect it to resolve.
Now in order to understand shock loss you have to understand the hair growth cycle. The hairs are in three phases of growth any period in time. When they’re normally on your head, they’re normally in their growth phase. However, when hairs get shocked, such as when they’re extracted from the head and transferred to another location, they go into the resting phase and they’re going to stay there for quite a bit of time, maybe one to three months.
There’s a third part of the hair cycle, which is the shedding phase. That shedding phase is in between the resting phase and the growth phase. That means that any hair that wants to come out of resting and back into growth has to go through shedding, meaning that the hair shaft is going to fall out, which presents itself as shedding hairs to you. Otherwise, the shock loss phase where you don’t see any hairs.
Now, shock loss is naturally going to occur after a transplant. As you imagine it’s because after we transplant a hair and move to a location, it’s going to go through a period of stress. This shock loss period can start anywhere from four days up to three months after your procedure and that’s because hairs just don’t immediately go through the resting phase into shedding. They might have to sit in resting for a short period of time.
So from a period of five days to three months after your procedure, you may notice that you’re having some shedding and loss of hairs. Between months four and 11, you might notice that the hairs are actually sitting there in the shedding phase itself, that they’re not growing. But around six to 12 months, you will notice that these hairs grow back into their growth phase and they all kind of come in, maybe in sync or just slightly out of sync by a couple of months, but it’s nothing to be afraid about.
After about five days of that hair follicle resting in your skin, it is well seated and it’s going to grow. If you see shedding before that, it’s also probably fine. It’s no big deal because the shaft is different than the follicle itself.
So shock loss is a process. It occurs in a lot of people. We are seeing that some of our micro patients are exhibiting less shock loss than others. We don’t know what benefits it provides. It really just tells us that that procedure is more gentle and less traumatic and maybe better off for all patients in the future to go down that route.
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