Hair restoration patients with more advanced patterns of hair loss usually want the maximum number of hair grafts transplanted in as few surgeries as possible. Any hair transplant surgery requiring 3000 or more grafts is a megasession. Patients enjoy more dramatic results with fewer hair transplant procedures when we perform these single-session surgeries.
Follicular unit transplantation combined with dense packing in megasessions are providing patients with previously unimagined results in a single surgery.
The advantages of megasessions include:
◾fewer hair restoration surgeries are required
◾better graft yield and survival
◾less donor scarring
◾less downtime for the patient
◾aesthetically excellent results
◾no plugginess between surgeries
◾greater overall value
Megasessions are safe and produce exceptional results when performed by experienced hair transplant surgeons with well trained technicians. It takes years of experience and many hundreds of hair loss patients to attain the necessary expertise to perform megasession hair restoration. We would advise patients looking into this option to carefully research prospective clinics to ensure they have documented consistent results performing megasessions.
The Development of Megasession Techniques
First generation hair transplant techniques involved mini-micro grafting: the grafts and their recipient sites were both large, (generally > 2.5 mm). Grafts had to be spaced out considerably thereby requiring multiple sessions to establish a decent level of density and realism.
The advent of microscopic dissection allowed donor hair to be harvested in its natural grouping or follicular units. These follicular units were much smaller than the mini-grafts that they replaced. This allowed for correspondingly smaller recipient sites that produced much less vascular damage in the scalp.
The closer spacing of recipient sites allowed for more densely packed grafts. Densities that previously took two to six sessions to achieve could now be reached in a single session. This became known as the one-pass result. There have been numerous advantages acknowledged with megasession hair transplant surgery.
Initially, these surgical procedures averaged around 2500 to 3000 follicular unit grafts in size. The limitation here was the size of the donor strip taken which was approximately 30cm long and 1.2 cm wide. These early sessions were termed megasessions. There is no fixed upper limit in terms of how many follicular unit grafts can be placed in a single surgery given the right conditions. The limiting factors are scalp laxity, donor density and size of the recipient area.
Hasson & Wong.
