Hair Restoration Research Paper

Historical Overview: Hair Restoration

The first written record of successful hair transplantation to treat baldness in humans was published in 1822 in Wurzburg, Germany-181 years ago. A medical student named Diffenbach described experimental surgery performed by himself and his surgeon mentor Professor Dom Unger in animals and in humans. They successfully transplanted hair from one area of a patient's scalp to another area. Professor Unger was said to believe that hair transplantation would make baldness a rarity.

Few additional mentions of hair transplantation appeared in surgical literature over following decades, however, and few if any surgeons adapted Professor Unger's technique to treat androgenetic alopecia (inherited pattern baldness). Surgical procedures using hair-bearing skin flaps and grafts were first adapted to the treatment of traumatic alopecia (baldness caused by burns or other physical injury) in the late 19th Century.

Male-pattern baldness was not neglected in the 19th Century. It had the attention of "medicine men" who sold various concoctions and nostrums purported to be cures for baldness when rubbed on the scalp or sipped from the bottle. The "medicine man" famous in Western lore is the top-hatted snake-oil salesman who traveled from town to town in his painted wagon. Newspapers of the
Orentreich showed that the success of hair transplants for androgenetic alopecia is dependent on donor dominance. Donor dominant transplants continue to show the hair-growing characteristics of hair from the donor site after transplantation to the recipient site. Research published in the 1950s and 1960s also confirmed that so-called "male-pattern baldness" is an inherited condition, treatable by hair transplantation. These findings put to rest other hypotheses regarding the cause of male-pattern baldness-among them, the theory that movement of the scalp muscles would, over a long period of time, incapacitate hair follicles and cause