Research is showing that liposuctioning a woman’s own fat and injecting it into her breasts is a safe and effective alternative to traditional breast implants. There have been recent concerns that such procedures may result in the injected fat calcifying and making mammograms more difficult to read, or that the injected fat might be reabsorbed into the woman’s body. However, the study presented showed that these concerns were not substantiated by the research. In this study, the liposuctioned fat did not calcify or cause problems with reading the subject’s mammograms. The fat was not usually reabsorbed; it survived in over 85% of cases. Patients were pleased with their results, and the procedure was able to be completed an only an hour and a half. However, the breast volume was not static – it increased or decreased as a woman’s general weight increased or decreased. There was also a poor level of compliance with patients instructed to use a tissue-expanding device prior to their procedures.
Women who seek breast lifts often need some form of additional augmentation, so breast implants are often inserted at the time of the breast lift procedure. However, research has shown that injecting a woman’s own fat into her breasts offers a viable alternative for creating additional fullness. The complication rates were lower in women who received fat injections versus breast implants, and none of the patients involved in the study had any abnormalities in their mammograms after the fat-injecting procedure.