Hair Transplant From Another Person: Risks and Success Rate

What are The Potential Risks of Receiving a Hair Transplant From a Donor?

Transplanting hair from another person carries significant risks, primarily due to the body’s natural immune response. Just like in organ transplants, your immune system recognizes foreign tissues and may attack them. This can lead to transplant rejection, where the donor hair follicles are destroyed, making the transplant unsuccessful. Additionally, there’s a risk of infection and complications related to immune-suppressing medications, which would be required to prevent rejection. These risks make hair transplants from donors other than the patient very challenging and not widely practiced.

Can a Hair Transplant From Another Person Be Successful?

In general, hair transplants from another person have a very low success rate due to the body’s immune response. Without a close genetic match, such as in the case of identical twins, the likelihood of rejection is extremely high. To make such a procedure work, patients would need to take immunosuppressive drugs, which carry their own health risks and side effects. For these reasons, most hair transplant clinics do not perform transplants with donor hair from someone else.

Can You Get Hair Transplant From Your Siblings?

While receiving a hair transplant from a sibling may seem like a more viable option due to genetic similarities, the risk of rejection is still present. Even siblings do not have perfectly matching tissue types, so the immune system may still recognize the donor hair as foreign and attack it. Although the chances of success may be slightly higher than with unrelated donors, hair transplants between siblings remain highly risky and are rarely recommended.

Is Hair Transplant Between Identical Twins Possible?

Theoretically, a hair transplant between identical twins has a higher chance of success compared to any other donor situation. Since identical twins share the same genetic makeup, the risk of rejection is greatly reduced. In cases where one twin has enough donor hair to share with the other, a hair transplant can be performed with minimal risk of the body rejecting the grafts. However, this is an exceptionally rare case and not applicable to most people seeking hair restoration.

Would It Be Possible For You To Use Someone Else's Hair For A Hair Transplant?

Can someone else donate hair for my transplant is a question we've been asked a few times, and the short answer is no, we wouldn't recommend it. People think of hair transplant donors when they think of transplants. If doctors can transplant organs, why can't they transplant hair?

It would be nearly impossible to perform a hair transplant using someone else's hair. Due to compatibility issues, a hair transplant only uses hair from your own body. As a result, a doctor would not use hair from another person to avoid donor hair rejection by the recipient and future infections. If you use someone else's hair, your body will automatically develop an immune response and reject the foreign hair, which can lead to infections and hair loss, rendering the hair transplant ineffective.

Is It Possible To Use Body Hair For A Hair Transplant?

There are some differences between scalp and body hair that can cause a hair transplant to look unnatural and, in some cases, fail. There are several concerns, including the following: the difference in structure between scalp hair and body hair, the process used to remove body hair, the incompatibility between scalp hair and body hair, hair death two or three years after the procedure, and typically body hair has a lower quality than scalp hair because the hair and structure in the scalp are more coherent than the hair around the body. When it comes to hair transplantation, compatibility is critical for a good result, and body hair does not have this with the scalp.

The success rate of a hair transplant using body hair is significantly lower than that of a hair transplant using scalp hair. The main reason for this is that body hair is not as healthy as scalp hair, so not all hair will take.