I do a lot of breast lift surgery, and explant (breast implant removal) with breast lift. When you do the lift, many times you would like a little extra volume. The perfect answer seems to be to do a little liposuction and take that extra fat from where you don’t want it (abdomen, love handles) and put it where you do (breasts). I love doing liposuction when doing breast surgery (lifts and reductions and explants), as breasts and body are all about proportion. If I am making your breasts smaller, making your torso smaller at the same time is great-proportion of breast to body remains constant.
Can you do fat grafting to the breast at the same time?
Short answer is no.
Why? The reason is that when you do a breast lift you are interrupting the blood supply when you are lifting. The blood supply (and nerve supply) to the nipple is based on what we call the “pedicle.” It is enough supply to keep the nipple alive. It is enough supply to heal the breast.
But fat transfer to the breast requires blood supply as well.
If you try to fat graft at the same time as a breast lift, that would be like trying to plant new trees in a drought. Fat needs to form a new blood supply in order to live. If fat doesn’t live, it can form microcalcifications, fat necrosis, oil cysts, or just not survive and give you the extra volume you are looking for.
Not to mention it could stress the system in the breast lift, which could affect the healing of your lift.
So what are your options? There are two good ones:
- Do the lift (or reduction or explant with lift) and do liposuction. Making your body smaller will make your breasts look larger. You change the proportion. It changes your fat pattern, so in the future when you gain weight, where it goes will be different. What that means, is currently if you put on 10 pounds and it goes to your belly and NOT your breasts, if you do liposuction to remove your belly and love handle fat, when you gain 10 pounds in the future it won’t go to your belly and love handles like it did before, as that fat was removed with liposuction. The newly gained weight will go to where you still have fat (which includes the breast). NOTE: once you do liposuction, that fat is gone. You cannot “store” it for later use.
- OR if you are wed to doing fat grafting to the breast, you do it as a two stage procedure. One surgery to do the lift. Then one surgery to do the fat grafting. (discuss the order of surgeries with your doctor).