I love fat grafting and am always on the lookout for ways to improve the fat survival and predictability, particularly if it looks like something that will be usable in the OR sometime soon.
This was a paper from the May 2015 Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Journal, where they published the Plastic Surgery Research Council papers. The title is “N-Acetylcysteine Improves Autologous Fat Graft Survival in a Mouse Model.”
When we harvest fat we use a tumnescent solution in the area where we harvest from to numb the area and decrease bleeding. This is a standard technique everyone uses. Basically, they added N Acetylcysteine (NAC) to the tumnescent fluid they used. The NAC is a safe anti-oxidant.
They theorized the antioxidant may help improve fat survival.
Findings?
It improved fat survival, with 46% take in those with NAC versus 17% in the control. The explanted grafts were significantly larger in volume and had higher adipocyte density on histology. No increase in vascularity was seen.
Thoughts?
They think the antioxidant helped the fat cell deal with the “stress” of being transferred. They think it protected the cell from oxidative stress and increased survival of the stem cells and fat cells themselves.
I loved reading about this study. This would be a quick and easy step we could use for fat transfer to help improve fat survival. I hope to see more studies on this soon, so we can put it into action.