Cold Storage of hair transplant grafts.

drcole

It is known that cold storage reduces the metabolism of grafts and can improve survival of transplanted organs or tissue. There are different types of storage solutions for a variety of temperatures. It is dangerous to store warm storage mediums at cold temperature and it is equally dangerous to store cold storage mediums at warm temperature. Grafts should be kept at a cold temperature in a cold storage medium and they should be kept at room temperature in a warm storage medium. Room temperature is generally about 20 degrees Celsius. The ideal temperature to store grafts is about 2 to 4 degrees Celsius because this is the temperature where cellular metabolish is only about 5% of what it is at body temperature (37.5 degrees Celsius). Therefore, the ideal scenario for grafts is a cold storage medium at a constant low temperature between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius.

To illustrate this point a recent hair transplant study compared cold storage to warm storage. All grafts were two hair grafts. An equal number (30) of grafts was placed on opposite sides of the crown. The grafts on the right were stored in hypothermosol. The grafts on the left were placed in plasma-lyte A. This study was carried out by William Parsley. The hypothermosol side showed a significant improvement in appearance.

It is important to note that tissue does much better when stored in a constant temperature. Traditional methods of storage include on top of ice packs or in dishes filled with ice. Both of these methods can warm quite suddenly and in a matter of minutes the temperature can rise from 8 degrees Celsius to 20 degrees Celsius. This can be quite damaging to tissue and it can also place grafts stored in hypothermosol at risk of dessication. For this reason we monitor our graft temperatures often and we store them in our patent pending cold storage circulating system that maintains a constant 2 to 3 degrees Celsius. We check our graft temperature every hour with a laser thermometer. This insures our grafts the greatest chance of success.