AESTHETIC MEDICINE AND SURGERY
LIPOSUCTION
Liposuction
Local fat tissue deposits may persist in many body areas, despite weight loss. Liposuction (lipoaspiration or liposculpture) is a surgical procedure designed to remove these deposits. It is not a method of losing weight.
Prior to undertaking liposuction, it is essential to evaluate skin quality and elasticity: relaxed skin, inelastic skin or skin with stretch marks cannot retreat adequately after removal of the fat below. In these instances, lipoaspiration alone can result in skin laxity with the appearance of new wrinkles, profile irregularities or worsening of pre-existing ones, so more complex procedures may be required. In fact, liposuction is a technique integral to many major interventions, such as abdominoplasty and arm or thigh lifts.
Note that lipoaspiration does not allow for the correction of cellulite.
The technique makes use of cannulas (small sterile tubes with aspiration holes) which are introduced underneath the skin through small cutaneous incisions into the fatty tissue layer. By design, these cannulas allow fat deposits to be eliminated -with use of an external aspirator -without damaging important structures such as blood vessels and lymphatic vessels. Only dissolvable sutures are used. The resulting scars after surgery are millimeters wide and hidden alongside cutaneous grooves or in easily concealed areas.
In order to improve the aesthetic result, it is important to perform post-operative lymph drainage or massage sessions, to speed up swelling resorption.
Depending on the size of the defect to be corrected, liposuction may be performed under local anaesthesia (patient is awake and only the area to be treated is ‘asleep’), local anesthesia with sedation, or general anesthesia (the patient is asleep). In the latter case a one-night stay in hospital is necessary.
Careful administration of pain-killers during and after the surgery ensures that post-operative pain and discomfort are kept to a minimum.
