What is FUSS Hair Restoration?'

Name: Ashmail

Question: What is FUSS hair restoration? Is it surgery?

Answer: Hi, Ashmail. Yes, FUSS is a widely used type of hair transplant.

FUSS stands for Follicular Unit Strip Surgery, sometimes referred to as 'strip surgery'. It is also, perhaps more commonly - certainly in the UK - known as FUT (Follicular Unit Transplantation).

It is one of the two most common methods currently used in surgical hair restoration alongside FUE, which used to stand for Follicular Unit Extraction but was recently changed to Follicular Unit Excision.

The key difference between these procedures is the way in which the donor hairs are harvested; whilst FUE involves removing individual donor hairs using a punch device or ARTAS robot, FUT involves taking a strip of skin from the back or sides of the scalp, then carefully dissecting this to obtain the necessary units to be transplanted.

If you are considering ways in which to treat hair loss, it is worth noting that having a hair transplant is not always the 'quick fix' solution many people assume it to be. What surgical hair restoration does is take hair from the areas of the scalp that are unaffected by Male Pattern Baldness - namely the sides or the back - and move them to the areas where there is hair thinning or a receding hairline.

It is still quite rare for men to have their whole vertex - along the top of the scalp from hairline to crown - and temporal areas replaced, unsurprisingly given the amount of good quality donor hair this type of extensive surgery would require, not to mention the cost. What this means is that, with the exception of the transplanted hairs, the follicles in these target areas remain susceptible to the ravages of DHT - the hormone which causes thinning hair and hairloss in cases of Male Pattern Baldness.

Therefore, in order to preserve the hair surrounding the grafts, it is important to follow an on-going aftercare programme. Ironically, this involves using the same types of clinically-proven hair loss treatments many men use to help them avoid a hair transplant in the first place. To find out more about the types of treatments which may be best suited to your specific condition, level and pattern of shedding, we would recommend having a professional consultation with a hair specialist before - or whilst - exploring surgical options, as often surgery is not actually necessary - especially if you are under 30 years of age.