Ayo Otunbanjo is the Chief Executive Officer, Vinci Hair Clinic Africa Region. In this interview, he speaks about the various types of hair loss also called alopecia, the causes, and available treatments including the innovative hair transplant surgeries offered by the clinic, and ways to prevent suffering from some types of the condition.

With your experiences with Nigerians, how prevalent is hair loss in the country?

Hair loss is very prevalent in the country. 60% of men have androgenic alopecia while 40% of women have it as well. Traction alopecia is found probably in 2 or 3 out of the female patients we see while other types are rare.

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Is age a factor responsible for alopecia?

People always say the older you get, the more brittle your fibres become. This is not necessarily the case. Wole Soyinka is a good example here. So, yes, age can be a factor. Psychological factors can also lead to hair loss. You see some people in their early 20s or 30s having receding hairlines. This might be due to a number of psychological factors.

What are the common types of hair loss that your organisation has been dealing with?

We have several types of alopecia but the commonest ones we tend to see in our clinics, especially in Africa and maybe all over the world, are really the genetic forms of hair loss called androgenic alopecia found in men with receding hairlines. This is also what is popularly called bald hair.

Women also have androgenic alopecia but the pattern of theirs is diffused so the hair loss is in the middle part of the scalp and goes sideways whereas for men it goes backwards.

The other most common type of alopecia we come across is traction alopecia, which results basically from practices in the hair salon. Women usually go to the salon and the more the type of repetitive hairstyles they do, the more they damage those follicle roots over a period of time, and it gets to a point when the follicles start dying off. That is why you see some African women with this type of hair loss.

So traction hair loss also results from the way women fix hair. People use certain types of glue to fix their hair to make it look natural, and could cause frontal hair loss for women.

Other types of alopecia are alopecia areata, which is sometimes a medically-induced form of hair loss. When someone has an underlying medical condition it can cause it. They can wake up to see patches of hair, and Africans can typically allude to spiritual meaning to it.

There is also the more insidious type of alopecia called cicatricial alopecia, which results from a bad reaction to chemical relaxers.

There is another type of alopecia, which covers the whole body called alopecia Universalis. It is a medical condition usually linked to autoimmune diseases like lupus.

Can you briefly tell us about your hair clinic?

Vinci Hair Clinic is a global medical aesthetics clinic. We have about 35 clinics in about 14 countries globally.

So we are virtually represented on every continent. We offer full treatment options for hair loss restoration.

The treatment options cover anything from just medication if you are at the lower end of a hair loss spectrum to some therapies that we deploy in the clinic such as platelet-rich plasma therapy, mesotherapy, cortico-steroids injections and different types of treatment for different kinds of alopecia.

We also do cosmetic procedures like scalp pigmentation, which is very popular with men, and at the very end of the treatment spectrum.

We also have hair transplant procedures, surgical procedures and products; one of them is the laser cap, which you can do on your own at home or office. So we offer a full range of treatment options.

The Abuja branch of the clinic only does the non-surgical procedures; that is, everything I have mentioned with exception of hair transplant surgery can be carried out here in the Abuja branch of the clinic.

How does your organisation utilise medical experts in the process of restoring hair loss?

We have well-trained medical teams who do the treatments. You need to be well-trained and well-experienced in hair loss restoration because there are different types of alopecia. And without the proper diagnosis of a particular type of hair loss or alopecia you could end up prescribing the wrong treatment options for the person, and that will not meet expectations or resolve the problem. Aside from hair on the head, our treatment also extends to beards, and eyebrows, among others etc.

So you need to be an expert; there is a certain level of experience needed apart from study to be able to ask pertinent questions during consultation to know what caused the particular alopecia the person is experiencing.

By so doing 95 per cent of the time you are able to narrow down the particular type of alopecia you are dealing with, and that would give you enough confidence on what to recommend as a treatment option.

Some women suffer hair loss when they undergo chemotherapy. How does your clinic handle that kind of hair loss?

One of the side effects of chemotherapy is loss of hair, but it is not hair loss. This might sound strange. The reason is very simple.

When you are going through chemotherapy, you lose your hair fibres, your follicles don’t die, it is the fibres that die off so your follicles are still healthy. Once you stop chemotherapy, those follicles start producing hair again. So it is not hair loss it is just one of the side effects. That is why you see cancer patients with hair after they stop the treatment.

When people are born without any hair on their heads, there is a belief that all hope is lost. But you are changing that now with innovative hair transplants, tell us how you help in this regard.

Hair transplant is a procedure whereby we take donor follicles from the healthy part of the scalp, which is usually at the back or the sides.

Most people suffering from androgenic alopecia tend to have hair loss in the middle of the scalp. That is where the enzymes affect and kill the follicles.

So when we do hair transplant surgery, we take follicles from the healthy part of the scalp, which is not affected by the enzymes.

So those follicles are surgically implanted in the areas where we want to see the hair growth. So you are the self-donor of the follicles moved from one part to the other.

This does not mean the area where the follicles are taken from will be without hair, because new cells will develop in the area and the hair will grow where we took door follicles. The main thing is the area where you suffer hair loss will now start producing hair.

What happens when the person does not have healthy enzymes on the head at all?

The condition alopecia totalis or Universalis, meaning you have no hair at all on your scalp or your body presents a challenge for a hair transplant because you can only take the donor follicles from the cell. 

But if a person doesn’t have the donor follicles from the cell, the common question people ask is ‘can you take from one person and give to another person?’

Yes, medically it is possible but ethically it is not right. This is because medically you follow the same procedure of harvesting and implanting follicles, but you have to start taking anti-rejection drugs forever so that the cells do not reject the ones imported to your body.

So this is not worth doing continuously as hair loss is not a life-threatening condition. That is why it is not common to see third-party donor follicles in hair transplants like in other medical procedures like kidney, liver etc because they are needed for life-threatening conditions.

 Can you explain each of the treatment procedures you do to restore hair?

We do Platelet-rich Plasma therapy involving taking your blood in a test tube, like four test tubes then placing them in a centrifuge, which spins the test tubes at a very high speed.

At the end of the spinning period, the plasma of your blood rises to the top of the test tube that is how it gets separated, then using a syringe you are able to gently extract the plasma at the top of the test tube.

It is that plasma that is injected back into the area where one wants to repair the thinning follicles.

Another treatment option is mesotherapy, which involves injecting pharmaceutical minosodel directly into the scalp.

We also have micro-scalp pigmentation, which actually makes a man looks as if he has hair. You have your hairlines but the rest of the scalp is pigmented with medical-grade ink to make you look like you have hair.

Another one is cortico-steroid injections given to people with alopecia areata caused by diseases like lupus.

We also have a range of products for the treatment of hair loss such as specially-made shampoos and other products used for medications.

How affordable are your services for the average Nigerian?

We want to make our services as accessible to as many people as possible. It just makes commercial sense to do that.

However, the costs of medication are what they are. If you are to buy a three-month supply of topical medication, for instance, you may need N86, 000 depending on the treatment. When a transplant is involved, you will be looking at $2, 000 (N1.4 million to N2.8 million) or more. The reason is simple. None of the stuff used in the clinic is made in Nigeria, they are brought in from abroad. And we are aware of the rate of inflation, and exchange rate currently, etc.

What is your advice for people suffering from hair loss?

There is a solution to hair loss and there is no need to panic. Secondly, there are things you can do to prevent it in some cases, for instance, why do you need to make your braids so tight that they give you headache?

Also, if you look around your family members and see people with hair loss, like baldness, for instance, it means that you might be susceptible to the genetic forms of it. So it is good to come to us at the early stage for immediate preventive procedures. Baldness can be prevented contrary to some myths and beliefs.

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