Article
Does stem cell enrichment enhance fat uptake in jet-assisted fat transfer for breast augmentation?
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Published: | September 10, 2012 |
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Body-Jet-assisted fat transfer for augmentation and reconstruction of breasts is popular in Finland. Overall, more than 100 breast augmentation procedures by lipotransfer (BEAULI-method) have been performed by the author with mean follow-up of 18,9 months (4–36). The purpose of the study was to determine if enriching the transferred fat with autological stem cells will enhance uptake of BEAULI-fat. In a prospective study, eleven women had breast augmentation with enrichment with Cytori Celution method and seven women had non-enrichened, normal BEAULI transfer. As no obvious difference could be seen in mri volumetric studies, the study protocoll was changed so that patient's one breast was enrichened and the other not, and the patient had another transfer after 4–6 months, now another breast enrichened. Multistation as a cheaper method was used for stem cell processing and four patients were operated in this latter series. MRI was performed before and appr 6 months after each procedure in all patients. In these 18 or in all over hundred procedures, there are no major complications and few minor (local) complications: one 3 cm hematoma in breast, 7 patients with few small oil cysts, 2 patients with a small fat necrosis (severely scarred breasts after previous surgical complications). In volumetric analysis based on MRI, main difficulty was that many patients had lost or gained weight, which clearly affected the results. No superiority of either method could be determined. Individual differences in especially recipient area (elasticity, thickness of subcutaneous fat layer) seem to be of more importance than the amount of stem cells in transferred fat. Healthy breasts contain billions of stem cells, and atraumatically collected fat contains millions, so enrichment may not be necessary or even cost beneficial in BEAULI fat transfer. In scarred or damaged stem cell poor tissue, enriching might be beneficial.