Dr. Robert Whitfield explains that fat transfer has been done for over a century, but success depends on how you handle the graft and prepare the patient. When combined with explant surgery, minimizing chronic inflammation before the procedure is critical for better outcomes.
Here's the key point. Fat transfers on a whole are not new. Surgeons have been using them for well over 100 years. In the early attempts of fat transfers, just because of a lack of understanding about how to handle the fat, the blood supply, the optimization of patients, and overall just understanding of graft survival, the cases didn't go as well as as they could have. But over time, like many things, techniques evolved, both the removal of the fat, the processing of the fat, and then the placement has become more and more refined, and so the outcomes are more reliable. But here's the key point. Fat transfers work best when the individual is prepared properly. And that becomes even more important when we're combining explant surgery, which itself, especially my patients, they've come in with usually a fair amount of inflammation that's chronic, and we don't want them to have anything but the smoothest possible course.
