This is not your only cure for baldness

For years, hair fall has been a nightmare for people and apart from hair transplants, a new treatment is at hand.

Dr Satish Bhatia, dermatologist at Lady Ratan Tata Medical and research Centre, has been treating hair loss patients for over a year with Autologous Cell Therapy and Platelet-rich plasma procedure. He claims to have treated over 100 patients by using this procedure and considers it as a better alternative to hair transplants.

The Autologous Cell Therapy is a kind of stem cell therapy where the patient's own cells are inserted back into the body. Then hair-growth factors or follicle growth factors are injected in them, after which the cells are injected into the person's skull. "The procedure involves injecting the person's own cells into his body.

So there is little chance of rejection or any other complication," said Dr Bhatia. The same advantage is also applicable to the platelet-rich plasma procedure where a patient's blood sample is extracted and the plasma is injected back into his body. The patient will start to see results two months after the procedure.

Though the success rate for this procedures is not drastically different from the success rate of hair transplants, they involve less complications and patients are less likely to have recurring hair loss. "The success rate is about 70 %. Even among them, many patients have come back later complaining of hair loss," admits Dr Bhatia.

The only side effect of cell and plasma therapy is that the patient could suffer from headache and giddiness. "It has happened with about 5% of my patients," states Dr Bhatia.

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