Hi all,
I visited my GP a few months ago to get advice around options for hair loss medications. I had heard before that hair loss medications (without doing that much research) can have side effects, such as depression, so I wanted to learn more about these side effects from my GP. I essentially was told that they don’t deal with this area and couldn’t give me much information. However, she looked into places that do and I found myself at a place called Hair and Skin Science (https://www.hairandskinscience.com.au/) (I’m in Australia).
I did a consultation and they went through the 3 different types of non-medicated treatments they do. The first 2 (PRF and PRP) use platelets in your blood to stimulate growth, while the third (PGF)(Our Treatments: Patented Growth Factors For Hair Loss) was a new treatment that didn’t use your own blood and uses some sort of “Growth Factors” sourced from a “FDA tissue bank”. This is the most expensive treatment at $600 a treatment but is supposedly the most affective.
Now, while I was there, I asked about medications like Fin/Min/Dut, and was told about side affects such as depression, etc. The specific side affect that I was worried about is depression, as this is something that I have struggled with and have been taking an anti-depressant for a few years now. At the time, I was sold on this as they stated that with PGF, you go through a “growth phase” doing 1 treatment every 3 weeks (typically doing 4 treatments) and then going into the “maintenance phase” of doing a treatment once every 6 months. This helped me accept the cost of the treatments and I was keen on not going through issues of depression again.
On top of the PGF treatments, I also everyday use one drop of this “hair regrowth” serum that contains 0.2% Copper Peptide (GHK2-CU), 0.5% Ceramides, 2.0% Amino Acids, 0.5% Caffeine. Then I also use a dermastamp daily.
So fast forward to now, I have done 2 treatments so far due for the third in about a week. So all up 8 weeks since the first treatment. I have had a fair bit of shedding occurring to the point of being able to see my scalp on the top-front of my head when I couldn’t before which is fine as they said this would happen. However, my issue comes as during my last treatment, I asked how many people usually see satisfactory results within the first 4 treatments and then move onto maintenance? I didn’t get a straight answer necessarily and she said some people might need to do further treatments to get to satisfactory results before moving to maintenance. Further, she also mentioned that the maintenance period is introduced slowly, meaning you start by doing treatments every 6 weeks first, then slowly move to the 6 month period, but that even some people can’t do the 6 month period as hair loss starts to occur again.
This obviously had me concerned as I had made the decision to go with these expensive treatments as I was sold on them not being this frequent. I also haven’t seen results quite yet which has given me doubts as to me being able to move to a non-expensive maintenance period any time soon. So I’ve now done some more research and read the 2024 Official beginner guide for “I’m losing my hair, what can I do?” guide on tressless.com which has now got me thinking that these PGF treatments don’t actually stop DHT production, and seems like they just fight the side affects of it instead.
I believe that my hair loss is genetic and so I don’t think this treatment would be viable long-term for me without being too expensive and so I am now considering starting Fin.
The main reason of this post is I wanted to learn more about others experiences with the below:
- Has anyone else had any experience with this type of treatment (PGF treatment)?
- Has anyone else start on Fin/Min/Dut while taking anti-depressants such as Agomelatine, if so, how have the affects been?
Sorry for such a long post, I hope it’s at least helpful if no one else has heard of these types of treatments before as I haven’t seen anything about it on this subreddit before. Thanks in advance for any advice!