Fat grafting has been a technique used by plastic surgeons for years for correcting small areas of contouring such as facial wrinkles. Only recently has the idea of using a persons own fat to augment the breasts become a topic and procedure in plastic surgery. For years the American Society for Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) recommended that fat grafting to the breast be avoided and until recently most physicians did not perform this procedure. The major fear of this procedure being that the fat is difficult to distinguish from calcification and tumors of the breast on a mammogram. Other complications like the formation of cysts, the newly grafted tissue dying and breast deformity were also factors in the ASPS’s recommendation. And since the longevity of this procedure is unknown, additional complications and subsequent need for treatments is unknown as well.
Today there are newer technologies available to plastic surgeons to perform fat grafting procedures and to radiologists for detecting breast cancer, which is probably why we have recently seen news and articles on physicians experimenting with using fat grafting for breast surgeries. Although this procedure is gaining acceptance by physicians and patients the ASPS 2009 guidelines still state that such a procedure is not recommended. All in all additional data and research is needed in the area of fat grafting for use in breast augmentation before this becomes a safe and effective procedure.
Information in this article was taken from the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, Volume 30, Number 3, May/June 2010 from the Review Article “Fat Grafting to the Breast and Adipose-Derived Stem Cells: Recent Scientific Consensus and Controversy” by Hiroshi Mizuno, MD, PhD and Hiko Hyakusoku, MD, PhD.
