A great deal of discussion takes place at every plastic surgery meeting about the usefulness and safety of breast augmentation with the patients own fat cells placed by needle injection. While the technique is simple, and technically safe, it can be both time consuming and expensive.
The usefulness issues stem not from appearance of the injected breasts but whether or not there is reasonable longevity of the result to justify the cost and inconvenience of the procedure. Specifically if the fat “melts” away in less than one year, the only cosmetic result to the patient is that of the liposuction to harvest the fat.
This issue remains unresolved to the point that primary augmentation of the breast with fat is a procedure still in its infancy.
Filling in defects in previously implanted or reconstructed breasts requires much less volume in smaller areas, and initial data indicates the improvements last long enough, several years or more, to make the technique far more prevalent.
Neither operation carries any significant surgical risks. The safety issues revolve about the effect on cancer detection in breasts which have had large volumes of fat introduced by needle injection. This is not an issue in “touch up” injections for reconstructed breasts or in the small fill in areas of breasts augmented by implants.
With the amount of interest in fat injections into breast tissue I expect the cancer diagnostic issues to be resolved one way or another in the next two to three years. Many investigations or underway to improve the longevity of fat augmentations, but until the procedure becomes more popular; the effectiveness of the technique is still in question.
If you can inject fat in, can you inject it away?
The removal of small unsightly pockets of fat with out significant surgery has been the subject of much interest, especially when the skin surface is plagued by cellulite. No good surgical techniques treat cellulite effectively, and treatments to the skin surface may well improve it but do little for the small bulges which can be just as unsightly.
Micro-cannula liposuction and Smart Lipo laser fat melting are very good in small areas but require anesthesia and some healing time. The trend toward “lunch hour” procedures requiring no anesthesia has led to the adaptation of less invasive techniques .Specifically the pseudo science of mesotherapy which uses tiny needles and a “witches brew “of solutions injected beneath the skin for cellulite, to be extended to try to dissolve larger volumes of fat. The chemicals used for this purpose are not at all standardized and many of them are not FDA approved.
Its quite obvious that the implementation of random substance injections can cause significant problems for the patients and the physicians, the least of these being little or no results the worse loss of the skin surface and scarring. The state of Kansas has gone so far as to outlaw the use of injections to dissolve fat, and they are not endorsed but the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
In infiltration of a small volume of local anesthesia hurts less that the needle injections for dissolving fat and the tiny hole left behind by the ultra small cannula is virtually undetectable. The healing time is minimal and the results are permanent. These are the preferred methods for unsightly bulges.
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