Hi, I'm Dr. Gavin Sandercoe, and I'd like to talk a little bit about fat grafting to the breast. Fat grafting to the breast are becoming an increasingly hot topic in plastic surgery circles today in 2013. There's been a lot of questions raised about it in the past, and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has only recently started to endorse the idea after outright banning it over a decade ago. So what we do know is yes, it works, and with good hands and good technique, you can get about 50 or 60% of what you take, or what you put into a breast or an area to take and be maintained over time. We do know that it does cause some scarring. However, a well-trained radiologist can tell the difference between this scarring and the flux in calcification that is shown in breast cancer. In fact, the scarring that's caused by fat grafting to the breast is no worse that the scarring that we see after breast reduction.

The remaining question that we still haven't really shown is, can this or could this potentially increase a woman's breast cancer rate. Now, in Australia where we know that about one in seven to one in ten Australian women are going to have a breast cancer across their lifetime, is it acceptable to make it more like one in seven than one in ten? And there's some data that shows at least in the laboratory, in animal models, and in slides and dishes and things like that, the grafted cells can stimulate unstable cells into tripping into becoming a cancer cell. Now does that translate into the native breast in a human? And the answer is, we just don't know. There are some studies that suggest that at 10 years, there's no increase in those numbers, but they've been pretty weak in terms of study design, and I think that's the reason that some of the insurance companies are not insuring us at this stage.

I believe that fat grafting to breasts will be an option in the future. It may not be a commercially viable option, but for the people that really want it and want their breasts increased in size but don't want to take the other risks that are involved in having an implant, it will certainly become something that we will discuss in the future. At the time that I'm shooting this video in May of 2013, I'm not offering this as a reconstruction technique, but just watch this page, and the view may change within the next year or two.

Fat Transfer to the Breast: Stats and Results

Dr. Gavin Sandercoe discusses fat grafting to the breast, the risks and what to consider when inquiring into this surgery.