Hi! I’m Dr. Epstein. I am here with a patient who is a year and a half status post around 600 grafts to the perioral region, essentially the mustache and goatee regions.
The patient has somewhat of an interesting history. He was born with a cleft lip, surgery was done as a very young child. He was left with a scar that was repaired later on but he was still left with what he felt was a visible and un-esthetic scar. In addition, he had some fair amount of thinness throughout the whole goatee region.
Let’s take a closer look. This is his before picture. You see how thin his mustache was, very little in the goatee area.
Now this is him today. You can see we did a nice job in restoring the density throughout the mustache and the goatee areas.
He is here for a touch up. He is still a little bit thin right here through the scar as well as here; but overall he has gotten a very, very nice result. He is very happy with the naturalness as well as the density we achieved and the significant improvement.
Let me show you the donor area. This also has healed up really nice. He wears his hair quite short. If you look really closely you can actually see the fine line scar right there.
In today’s procedure what we are going to do is use that same scar. I am going to cut out that old scar and just do some more filling in here. In addition to help increase the percentage of hair growth in the scar area, we are going to be injecting some PRP (platelet rich plasma), which is very high in growth factors. We take a little bit of blood from him at the start of the procedure. It helps with the donor site healing as well but I do not think we can get much better with that donor site result. It was done with absorbable sutures so did not need to have them removed.
We are going to use some PRP injected actually into the area to help increase the take of the grafts.
Posted by Jeffrey Epstein, MD, FACS
