Analysis of Processing Methods in Fat Grafting: What a new study tells us.

Posted on October 30, 2014

I love fat grafting, as many of you know.  The recent October 2014 issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Journal had an article on “Comparative Analysis of Processing Methods in Fat Grafting.”  It was a study out of Boston.

What was it trying to find out?

When we do fat grafting for fat transfer, we harvest the fat with liposuction.  Then most of us process the fat using a filter or centrifuge to help concentrate the fat and remove any things we don’t like (like oil, damaged fat cells, blood, etc). So this study is trying to add some science to figure out what is the best way to process the fat.
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Ways to process fat include:

Their study looked at a few key points:

Technique They looked at liposuctioned fat from 9 women.  Each experiment was done with fat from an individual patient, so the control group was from that person.  The harvesting was done with a 4mm cannula at 1 atm of suction pressure.  They then did their tests and looked at histology.

Findings: