European Journal of Molecular & Clinical Medicine

Introduction: Autologous fat grafting is an aesthetic and reconstructive procedure in which an individual’s own fat is harvested and injected into the soft tissues to correct contour and other abnormalities. Fat graft is considered the ideal soft tissue filler for its biocompatibility, lack of immunogenicity and availability.
Materials and Methods: There were two groups and the first 25 patients were assigned to system-AF and the subsequent 25 patients were assigned to processing via system-PF. The operating surgeons and operating room staff were adequately trained before the procedure. Tumescence solution was used with either technique based on the surgeon’s standard practice with a limit of 1 litre. Means and standard deviations were used to abstract the continuous patient characteristics. Frequencies and proportions were used to present categorical patient characteristics.
Results: All patients (n = 50) were female with a history of breast cancer. Mean age was 51.7 years (SD ± 8.3 years; range, 36-70 years). The average body mass index was 27.6 kg/m². The average follow-up was approximately 3 years (35.5 months; range, 12.4 - 47.2 months). All patients were reportedly undergone mastectomy earlier with breast reconstruction. More patients had completed 2-staged tissue expander to implant-based reconstruction (n = 32, 65%) compared to autologous reconstruction (n = 19, 38%). The majority of patients (n = 45, 90%) received chemotherapy, and less than half of patients received radiation therapy (n = 23, 45%) prior to their fat grafting. Five patients (10%) had a postoperative complication. There was 4 incidence of palpable fat necrosis per group and no fat emboli in the study population. For all patients, this was the first fat grafting procedure; 25% of patients (n = 4 in each group) went on to have additional fat grafting. All other patients demographics and reconstruction parameters were not statistically different between the 2 groups.
Conclusion: AFG is essentially served as a valuable tool for majority of the plastic surgery that is increasing in its popularity that could possibly leading to new devices that were aimed to increase the efficacy and yield of injectable fat.