With hair restoration techniques improving with top doctors pushing research and development, surgeons are thinking to challenge the conventional donor area and look to widen the extraction zone to the body. BH or body hair has been used for some time with mixed results and should be approached with caution even now, but Dr. Christian Bisanga has found the richest supply in terms of sustainable quality of yield has been the upper chest and beard hair. Speculation can be it is closer to the traditional scalp donor so retains more characteristics, stronger follicular units with better calibre hair and more multiple hair units possibly.

BH potentially opens up the donor supply and this can be of a real benefit to repair patients whose scalp donor is very limited and potentially those with a high Norwood scale hair loss looking to achieve better coverage than their scalp donor can give. One of the challenges is the extraction technique to use, FUE, Follicular Unit Extraction, the use of a small micro surgical punch is implemented to extract each follicular group, the direction and angles of the BH can be very different to that of the scalp and this is an important factor in the survival and long term yield. Direction is especially difficult on the beard hair as the angles can change with almost every extraction so a very good and experienced understanding is required. Dr. Bisanga recommends that BH extraction is not undertaken unless a high degree of understanding is known from the doctor about much simpler scalp FUE. Scarring can be a large issue, especially on potential naked and very visible areas of the body like chest and beard/face, so the extraction tool size and technique is vital not to leave visible signs or scarring.

There are a number of interesting points to BH, DHT blockers can effect the growth in actually an opposite way to scalp donor hair. When using DHT blockers some men find their body hair quality and quantity decreases as the lack of DHT to body hair reduces the quality of the regrowth. It is not advisable to undergo a BH procedure if you are either on DHT blockers and suffer from this change or if you will potentially use DHT blockers in the future.

Another interesting case Dr. Christian Bisanga has noticed that long term growth, especially beard hair transplant starts to take on the characteristics of the scalp hair in the area of placement. Beard hair is generally thicker than most scalp hair and when initially placed can appear coarse and thicker than any surrounding scalp hair. It has been noted on cases that over time, around 12 months the beard hair regrowth began to soften in calibre blending much easier with surrounding scalp hair , native and or transplanted.

Dr. Bisanga has always had a cautious approach to BH over the last 5 years, and in his opinion rightly so as many procedures seem to fail in their objective, especially when using large amount of graft numbers per procedure. He is now quietly optimistic though about the future of BH for the patient and is happy to utilise BH more and more into his procedures. He remains cautious with his approach and has the patient well being always as priority. He is keeping the size of the procedures small to monitor potential scarring, also to spread the extraction over a wider area to allow for better cosmetic healing and in the recipient nor dense packing to encourage the best possible yield. Of course the downside is smaller procedures more are required, but the positive is the hair regrows with no obviously visible extraction scars and long term little wastage of valuable donor supply.