Recovery month by month › Shock loss

Shock loss after a hair transplant: what patients report

Shock loss is the loss of existing hair after surgery: native hair in the area where grafts were placed among it, or hair in the donor area at the back. It is different from the expected shedding of the transplanted hairs themselves, which falls out from about the second to the fourth week (Marwah and Mysore, J Cutan Aesthet Surg 2018), although patients often use the words loosely. A review of transplant complications says shock loss in the grafted area typically begins 2–6 weeks after surgery and is most often temporary, but can sometimes permanently reduce native hair, particularly hair that was already miniaturised; donor-area shock loss usually recovers fully within 3–4 months (Kerure and Patwardhan, J Cutan Aesthet Surg 2018). Beyond that, this page doesn't explain the medicine; your surgeon should. It shows what patients wrote about it.

Of 5,433 progress reports that patients posted about their own transplant on reddit (r/HairTransplants and r/tressless), 312 mention shock loss, written by 252 people; 293 of these threads have photos.

When patients mention it

Share of the progress reports at each point after surgery that mention shock loss. It is when people wrote about it, not when it started.

Days 1–14 1% (13 of 1,248)
Weeks 2–4 10% (41 of 427)
Month 1 16% (51 of 329)
Month 2 10% (25 of 251)
Month 3 10% (38 of 366)
Month 4 5% (20 of 396)
Month 5 8% (29 of 361)
Month 6 6% (27 of 484)
Months 7–9 3% (17 of 615)
Months 10–12 6% (32 of 558)
Year 2 7% (16 of 240)
Two years and later 2% (3 of 158)

What the people who posted again said later

53 of these people posted another progress report of their own at least three months later and at nine months or more. In their latest report, 45 described their experience as positive, 4 as mixed and 1 as negative; 3 didn't say. 6 still mentioned shock loss.

Read this with care: only people who chose to post again are counted, and those who stopped posting may differ from those who kept posting, so this is not a recovery rate.

In their own words

How to read these numbers

These are people who chose to post, not a clinical study. A thread "mentioning" shock loss can be a worry as much as a diagnosis, and some people call the normal shedding of new grafts shock loss. A thread counts once, at the point after surgery the patient stated, even if it names several doctors. How often a doctor's patients appear here says more about how many patients post than about the doctor, so we don't count by doctor. Removed threads are left out of the quotes. Your own surgeon's advice comes first.

See the whole recovery month by month, poor growth, or compare doctors' credentials, published prices and patient reports in the directory.

SaveMyHairline is an independent hair transplant doctor directory: published prices, checked credentials and real patient reports, with sources — and no clinic can pay to appear.