Fat transfer for breast augmentation seems like a fantastic idea, but has been very slow to take off in the UK. The reason for that is that we’ve been concerned that injecting fat into the breast might have some adverse effects, for example: it might promote breast cancer and it might make the detection of breast cancer more difficult. And these are, I think, some of the issues that have held back many surgeons and many patients. The reality is, it has been done around the world for the last ten years, and several thousand patients have been very closely monitored for signs of breast cancer. In fact breast cancer has been detected, I think, in one patient in a cohort of thirteen hundred patients, and that’s less breast cancer then you’d expect in a normal population. So there’s no evidence that the fat transfer has actually increased cancer rates. Secondly the types of changes that are caused in the breasts from the lipofilling don’t make cancer detection difficult, they don’t confound the mammograms or the ultrasound scans and actually there’s no evidence that it has any impact on the detection of newly developed cancer.
Generally there don’t appear to be any bad side effects from lipofilling, and I think it’s because we finally reached the point where we’ve realised, that these aren’t serious issues and that actually we look at the risk profile of lipofilling versus the risk profile of breast augmentation and actually it’s very favourable, and I think for that reason it’s about to start to take off now.
