Thank you for your question! You’re asking question about using minoxidil
extra strength for men and is it safe for women and I am sure it’s for your problem
you’re dealing with which is most likely female pattern hair loss. Well I can certainly
give you some guidance with this question. I’m a board certified cosmetic surgeon and
a fellowship trained oculofacial plastic and reconstructive surgeon and I am also the founder
of Trichostem™ Hair Regeneration centers, a procedure we developed in our practice as
a non-surgical alternative for hair loss for men and women.
So I certainly have a lot of
experience with the use of minoxidil. In this country, minoxidil and finasteride
are the two drugs that are FDA approved for men and minoxidil is FDA approved for women.
Now hair loss which 95% is referred to us familial and also called androgenetic alopecia
is basically progression of thinning hair. The hair starts at thick and eventually as
it sheds, it grows in and it gets thinner and thinner and continues to thin until it
stops growing all together and the area becomes smooth and its only skin.
So minoxidil has
certainly have role in the management of hair loss but it’s important to understand that
it does not stop hair loss, does not stop the progression. In my experience, it appears
minoxidil basically prolongs the growth cycle of thinning hairs. Now in this country, currently there is an
FDA approved of 5% foam Minoxidil for women and from my experience 5% is adequate for
its purpose now we have certainly tried compounding minoxidil and combining higher percentages
of retinols and other agents to help improve the topical treatment but what we have done
in our practice is basically eliminate majority of the indication for minoxidil because we
have developed something called Hair Regeneration. With Hair Regeneration what we are doing is
we are using a material called extracellular matrix (ECM) combined with your own blood
a part of your blood called platelet-rich plasma (PRP). And essentially, what we are
doing is what you want to try to do with minoxidil except we are doing something more. What we
are able to do is stop the progression of hair loss, reactivate hair that is not growing
as well as correct the hair growth cycle so then instead of thinning the hairs actually
grow thicker.
Now for women in our practice, we have achieved
more comparably 99% success. Now this is something that has evolved over years where for women
we initially had numbers like 88% success but what we did with time, we basically limited
who we treated to just female pattern hair loss and eliminated the types of patients
who have other problems such as chronic telogen effluvium. Now what that means is that within
12 to 15 months, most of our patients both men and women will see significant improvement
with this treatment which often is a single treatment. Sometimes there is more than one
injections separated by over a year but in essence, I think that there is opportunity
to consider alternatives besides just thinking stronger minoxidil. One of the challenges we had is that we would
encounter with higher strength minoxidil was scalp irritation and patients just didn’t
want to continue using something that is causing scalp to be irritated. Remember that minoxidil
was originally used for hypertension, for high blood pressure. In fact, the effect was
seen hair growth so I’m not saying it doesn’t have value but for most of our patients who
use minoxidil once, we Hair Regeneration treatment.
We had them stopped but to going back to answering
your original question as far as extra strength is concerned and from my perspective, 5% minoxidil
for women is adequate. As a side note, I would say most of our women
who we see in our practice who have tried Minoxidil in the past and stopped using Minoxidil
because they felt it wasn’t really doing much for them.
You know, it’s one thing
to try to hold on to the hair and it’s kind of a weird uncertainty whether or not the
minoxidil is effective. And for many patients, they just feel like they are not seeing a
difference to justify the twice daily use of Minoxidil as recommended by the many manufacturer
but still I personally believe that there is a role prior to someone having a treatment
like Hair Regeneration and again I think that if you want to use 5% minoxidil, I think that
would be adequate. And learn more about Hair Regeneration and find a practitioner who offers
this type of procedure learn more about that as well.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the
best of luck and thank you for your question!.