There are currently only a hand-full of FDA-approved treatments for hair loss, but all that is about to change says Dr. Robert M. Bernstein in the new November 2014 issue of “Cosmetics Business” magazine:
There are some important new [hair loss treatment] developments in the pipeline, including new and effective drugs, robotic surgery and cell-based approaches.
However, while there have been significant advances in new stem and cell-based therapies, surgical hair restoration is currently the only effective treatment option for restoring lost hair.
Modern surgical hair restoration, today’s natural-looking, virtually undetectable follicular unit hair transplantation procedures pioneered by Dr. Bernstein in the mid-1990s, have surged over the last 12 years, up over 85% since 2004 according to the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgeons.
In recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in the popularity of Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE). This popularity is due to it being minimally invasive, having a fast recovery time, and lacking the long visible scar that occurs with a FUT procedure.
First described by Drs. Rassman and Bernstein in 2002, FUE is a highly labor-intensive, exacting procedure that involves harvesting follicular units one at a time from a donor area on the scalp, located on the back and on the sides of the head.
Because FUE is labor-intensive, hair restoration surgeons have developed many automated hand-held devices to help harvest the follicular units. Nevertheless, despite the development of these hand-held devices, FUE remains a manual, labor-intensive extraction procedure requiring precision movements to avoid damaging the follicular units during dissection, but it is a level of precision that becomes difficult to maintain over the course of a long procedure.
All this, however, has changed with the computer-assisted, image-guided ARTAS® robot. Dr. Bernstein tells “Cosmetics Business” magazine that the ARTAS robot, unlike humans, becomes neither tired nor loses consistency over the course of extracting thousands of follicles – and the result is better quality grafts:
Follicular unit extraction (FUE) procedures have progressed from using labor-intensive hand-held instruments all the way to a computer-assisted, image-guided robot that dissects follicular units accurately and consistently, thousands of times in a single session.
In short, the ARTAS hair transplant system represents a significant advance in restoring lost hair, and it is available today:
The ARTAS Robotic Procedure has been perfected, and we are comfortable offering it to patients as the state-of-the-art procedure for permanent hair restoration,” says Bernstein. “The next stage for the ARTAS Robotic System will be the ability to create recipient sites in addition to harvesting grafts. Within the next three years, it will be the dominant method used around the world. With the addition of recipient site creation, we will be one step closer to fully-automated robotic hair transplantation.
“Cosmetics Business” is a leading international magazine published by the HPCi Media Group providing news and information to the cosmetics, personal care and beauty industries through various print, digital and live platforms. Quotes by Dr. Bernstein came from an article by Wendy Lewis in the November 2014 issue of “Cosmetics Business,” From hype to hair restoration: How new treatments for hair loss, from at-home solutions to improved surgical techniques, will be game-changers in the near future.
