Consultant Plastic Surgeons - News

There has been a lot of interest and discussion about this, with recent papers in some of the journals.

We have been using these techniques in plastic surgery for a long time, but there are interesting advances, and there has been progress recently. Plastic surgery has, since the earliest times used grafting of tissue in reconstruction, infact, this is really where plastic surgery had its beginnings.

 It is all about increasing the survival of the fat which we inject, and avoiding problems.

It is easy to take fat from somewhere else, like your bottom or tummy. We have leaned techniques to clean and process it, and separate out the good bits to re-inject elsewhere. In reconstruction this can be defects on the face, and adjusting symmetry after breast reconstruction in post cancer patients. For cosmetic surgery,we can use these techniques to fill out and re-contour faces, something which I find useful, and which patients seem to like. Other areas include breasts, and female labia/ genital cosmetic surgery.

Graft survival depends largely on blood supply, and other biological factors. This has limited the amount we can inject at one time.

Recent advances include new fat processing techniques, and possibly even mixing fat with patient’s cells grown in a laboratory. It may be that we can use these approaches for breast enhancements and augmentation. This is very exciting, but – we are not there yet.

I am going off into the big world to explore this, and will be attending a course in the next few months. I will keep you posted.