Botched abdominal liposuction with dents and ridges. Will a fat graft fix this? (Photos)

Hi,
Thank you so much for submitting your photos and your concerns. Contour irregularities are a potential risk of liposuction, as is skin laxity. From the photos, it appears that you are experiencing both. Fat grafting may help with the contour irregularities. However, you may also need to address the skin laxity. The excess skin may require excision, or a procedure to tighten the skin. In our office, we offer Morpheus8/BodyTite to address skin laxity, which can help stimulate collagen production. However, to best formulate a plan, I recommend that you see a fully-trained plastic surgeon for evaluation and treatment.
Best,Kristen Aliano Messina, MD

I want to first of all thank you for posting appropriate both before and after pictures.

You be amazed how many people don’t post pictures and want us to make assessments on the outcome of surgical procedures.

Based on your before picture i’m guessing that perhaps you may have had a history of weight fluctuations?

If so you may have a slight bit of skin laxity on your lower abdomen.

If that’s the case that it’s possible that cutting out some of the skin despite leaving a scar may have been a better procedure.

Skin laxity it’s one of the most common reasons patients fail to get good liposuction results.

I’m not excusing the work of your surgeon because despite being a good candidate or not your liposuction was not done well.

I would be highly reluctant to let the same provider do more liposuction or try to correct it since the skills weren’t there to do it right in the first place.

Revision work work as many times more difficult than primary Liposuction.

Fat transfer is an option but you need to understand the limitations of this procedure.

Areas that have been over treated with liposuction are now devoid or lacking enough supportive host tissue to support significant fat graft volumes. This means that only small amounts of fat will survive and any attempt to graft large volumes it’s only met by a greater percentage of graft failure.

Instead of grafting the volumes needed patients have to realize that it needs to be done in stages grafting small of months of fat each time and gradually building up the volume. to get an ideal outcome which most likely will still not match where you were before your procedure this may require 4-6 rounds of fat transfer.

It’s possible that improvements could be had by cutting out skin laxity if you do have it by simply removing most of the problem area.

Whether this could be done with a lower scar depends a lot on exactly how much fat is left and where in the relationship between your pubic area in your belly button.

Fat transfer it’s an option but if you have skin laxity it is in my opinion a lesser option.

If you opt for fat transfer you need to put yourself in the hands of someone who has experience and skill with a proven track record.

You need to except the limitations of each individual single round a fat to transfer is only partially improving the area. in the end it may not be possible to restore you to the way you were before liposuction.

Liposuction to some degree permanently and irreversibly changes someone’s body.

Reversing the process is many times more difficult and complex.

I’m not saying improvements can’t be had but I also want to convey to you how complex and challenging your situation is.

Be leery of providers who think this is an easy fix or a single round of fat transfer can fix the problem.

I would also be extremely leery of those who want to fix this by doing more liposuction especially with energy equipment like VASER.

You don’t need more liposuction done with aggressive equipment.

My number one recommendation to you is to slow down the process as much as you can. Take your time and meet with lots of plastic surgeons with in person consultations.

Get an idea of their experience and try to get them to show before and after pictures of previous revision work.

With fat transfer it is imperative that after pictures are taken at least three months from the time of the procedure.

Early for transfer postoperative pictures can be very impressive but do not at all represent final results.

It would be easy for anyone to graft fat into your lower abdomen making it look normal and then take a picture. That is however not how it’s going to look three months later.

Best of luck in your pursuit of correcting this.

Mats Hagstrom MD