Surgical Therapy

Surgical treatment of vitiligo involves the transplantation of functional melanocytes (pigment cells) or a skin graft to the depigmented area. This transplantation can be done through one of several methods, each of which harvests the melanocytes or skin in a different way. Although medical therapies such as topical creams and phototherapy have improved considerably in the last years, some people fail to sufficiently repigment with these treatments. Surgical therapy can provide higher re-pigmentation rates for difficult-to-treat localized areas in select patients and can be used to treat generalized disease as well. Those considered the best candidates, meaning that they most likely to experience a high rate of repigmentation from surgical therapies, are those with stable, segmental, or localized vitiligo.