Should you be hair banking to fight future baldness?

Lock it in — before it’s too late.Once your hair is already gone, regrowth treatments can only do so much — and in rare cases, they can have some serious side effects.But what if you could have a savings account… for your strands? Enter hair banking, the experimental treatment that could help fight future baldness by collecting and cloning the hair you have now.

While medications and transplants are the current remedies for the millions experiencing hair loss in the US, hair banking puts hair loss on ice — literally.The process is similar to egg or sperm banking, with single hair follicles, typically between 100 and 120, collected from a patient and stored via cryopreservation to freeze time on the stem cells in the hair.Cells from the dermal papilla, or the base of the follicle, are then multiplied in a process known as hair cloning — and, if successful, they are ready to be injected back into the scalp whenever the patient wants them.So it’s your own hair… collecting interest.“The idea behind hair banking is to preserve the hairs that have the most longevity,” Dr.

Carlos Wesley, a hair restoration surgeon, told The Post.“It’s preserving the potential that we have in the early stages of our lives to be used later on when it can be of more value.”When the cloned hair is added back to the patient’s scalp, it fuses with the existing stem cell of the hair follicle that’s thinning out, and “reprograms [the follicle] to stay in the growth stage for longer,” Wesley added.While hair transplants often require surgery and downtime, collecting the hairs to be banked is a much shorter and less invasive process.In a process that takes around 20 minutes, a small area of hair is shaved and numbed with lidocaine, according to Dr.

Matthew Lopresti.“Once that’s numbed up, hair units would be removed … down to the hair follicle itself,” saod Lopresti, Chief Hair Restoration Surgeon at Leonard Hair Transplant Associates.The process used to...