In order to understand this more fully, you need to know a little bit of both the hair transplant method and the biochemical nature of male pattern baldness, the condition that hair transplant seeks to cure.

Why and how does male pattern baldness occur? This is something that has been understood satisfactorily by doctors and scientists only in the last few decades.

A chemical substance of the human body that causes baldness in approximately 66% of all adult males is known as dihydrotestosterone or DHT. This is a male sex hormone which has important roles to play in many biological systems of the human body, including the central nervous system, the urinary and prostatic systems, and so forth. It also affects male scalp hair in two ways. Secreted in moderate amounts, it may induce hair growth. But when manufactured in large quantities, it has a destructive effect on hair.

The hair follicles and roots in your scalp shrink, shrivel up, cease to function and die under the influence of large doses of DHT. As a result, your scalp hair becomes thin and loose, and then falls out, causing baldness.

One interesting thing about his effect is that only the follicles situated in or near the center and temples of your head are affected by the excess of DHT. The peripheral follicles (those along the sides) of your head are not affected. For this reason, male pattern baldness begins at the temples and front-line, and then progresses backwards and sideways until all you have left is a thin ring of hair stretching from above one ear, round the back of your head, to above the other ear.

One way of treating male pattern baldness or MPB is by using a drug called finasteride which reduces the production of DHT in the male body. But of course that has side effects, and is not a guaranteed cure. A more expensive method is hair transplant, which offers much better success rates.

Without going into too much technical detail, the essence of the procedure is this. The surgeon basically uses hair from other portions of the patient's head and implants these into the bald portions. He takes sections of scalp from the back and sides of the patient's head, because these are the least affected by DHT, and these are then processed by a team of assistants. After removing the fatty and fibrous tissues, they carefully prepare the individual 'follicular grafts' from these sections, which are then used by the surgeon for planting in the bald areas.

The bald area is prepared by the surgeon, who makes numerous very small punctures there. He tries to place the punctures in some kind of natural pattern, so that they look more natural and orderly. Then the pieces of follicle graft prepared by the team of assistants are inserted painstakingly and with a great degree of skill into the punctures.

The success of the operation depends largely on the surgeon's skill in situating and creating the punctures, and the density he is able to achieve with the grafts. Fifty grafts per square centimeter is considered to be a very good density, giving an almost normal appearance to your new hair. Sometimes only one 'mega-session' of hair transplant is necessary for the correction of the problem, during which the surgeon may transplant up to 2500 or 3000 individual grafts. Sometimes more sessions are necessary over a period of several months or years.

Now comes the question of the age factor. Many surgeons may not want to perform hair transplant on patients who are too young, because the progress of their MPB has not stabilized yet.

MPB is a progressive disease that stabilizes after a certain age. This age may vary from patient to patient, but it is usually not less than 35. Unless you have stopped losing hair and have been left with a thin but stable encircling portion of hairy scalp around the back of your head, the surgeon may find it difficult to decide where to begin the transplants. If you continue to lose hair after the transplant, a situation may develop where the transplanted area has again been surrounded by bald areas. This will look even uglier than having no hair at all, and you may have to repeat the procedure. This is why most surgeons do not recommend hair transplants to patients who are younger than 35.

However, since the development of multi-session type transplants which may extend over several years, the age factor has not been as big a problem as it was before. Many surgeons will now operate on young patients to cover up their present bald portions on an 'ad hoc' basis, and continue to play catch up with MPB as it progresses over the years. This is more costly than performing a fixed number of sessions after the stabilization of MPB, but it has the advantage of keeping your scalp covered with hair during most of your lifetime.