Prosthesis (i.e. – artificial body members) – parts thereof – or ai – Implantable prosthesis – Hair or skin
Patent
1994-05-27
1996-07-02
Willse, David H.
Prosthesis (i.e., artificial body members), parts thereof, or ai
Implantable prosthesis
Hair or skin
606213, 606215, 606187, A61F 210
Patent
active
055317901
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
DESCRIPTION
The present invention relates to a device for extending living tissue.
The technical field of the invention is that of making materials that are surgically implantable in the human body.
One of the main applications of the invention is making extender devices that are implantable for a determined length of time beneath the scalp in order to diminish baldness, but other applications can be envisaged for the device of the invention wherever it is useful and/or necessary to stretch tissue, e.g. for diminishing wounds where it is necessary to be able to cover a damaged area with new skin, in particular when the original skin has been destroyed or damaged by burning, trauma, etc. . . .
With respect to so-called "male-pattern" baldness, it is known that definitive hair loss affects one in three of men aged 50.
Such baldness forms a part of a group of conditions known medically as "cicatricial alopecias": it is related to progressive and premature atrophy of hair follicles, at the roots of individual hairs, and its origins are genetic and hereditary.
So far, no medical treatment has managed to treat male-pattern baldness, and no therapeutic solution of a medical kind can be considered earlier than age 30 to 50.
At present, the only effective therapy is surgical, and more than 2 million Americans have had recourse to such surgery: this is done by surgically redistributing a fraction of healthy follicles that are genetically programmed to last throughout life. In practice, they constitute hair taken from around the tonsure.
For this purpose, essentially there are three techniques, namely: implants; reductions of the tonsure; and flaps; all three of which consist in moving healthy hair-carrying scalp to replace all or part of the bald scalp.
The present invention relates solely to the second and most recent technique of reducing tonsure: it makes it possible to achieve a clear improvement in results for extensive male-pattern baldness which constitute the major fraction of cases to be treated.
This technique consists in eliminating a region of bald skin and in moving towards each other the two edges of the wound once the surfaces situated beneath the scalp on either side of said wound have been separated. The two edges of the wound are then closed together under tension by means of surgical sutures stretching the scalp and thereby increasing the hair-carrying area at the expense of the bald area.
Thus, on average, it is possible to eliminate a 3 cm wide strip of bald scalp on each operation: four to six tonsure-reducing operations are then often required since there is a limit to skin resiliency and it is not reasonable to remove more than 3 cm at a time without running the risk of tearing; nevertheless, in spite of this high number of operations, and even if the number is increased, the result cannot be improved any further, and it is possible in this way to eliminate only about half of the initially bald area.
That failure to reduce the bald scalp area completely is related to two important phenomena that are combined:
There always occurs secondary distension or spreading of 20% to 50% of the bald areas close to the region of maximum tension, i.e. where the wound has been sutured, thereby generating a central region that always remains bald: this is well described and specified in the most important work on the topic devoted to surgery of the scalp, entitled "Hair transplantation", 2nd edition of 1987, by Mr. Rolf Norstrom and Walter Unger, in particular at pages 504 to 516, that specify area reductions in terms of percentages of the areas concerned by tonsure reduction.
A communication form Dr. Richard Shiell in Melbourne, Australia, dated February 1992, given during an international congress on scalp surgery at Los Angeles gives numerical results of the results of scalp reduction and confirms the limits of said technique.
Damage to or even final disappearance of ischemic hair follicles due to tension in the surface layers of the scalp, which disturbs and can slow down or even completely interrupt bl
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Charvin Guy
Fraisse Georges
Frechet Patrick
Frechet Patrick
MXM
Snow Bruce E.
Willse David H.
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