So fat grafting to the breast is the new wave of breast surgery. It is not without issues. One way to try to minimize some of those issues is to improve the fat “take;” which in English means the fat which has been moved forms a new blood supply and lives.
As I have discussed before, BRAVA helps with this in two major ways.
- It helps expand the tissue to allow for new spaces for the fat graft to be placed. Imagine your breast is a collapsed heap of chicken wire mesh. We want to put a fat cell into each little opening in the mesh, which is hard to do when it is collapsed in a heap. Now imagine we used something to pull on that mesh and lift it up and out. The spaces in the chicken wire are now more accessible. The thought is the better spacing and placement of the fat, the better the fat survival, the lower the issues like fat loss and calcification.
- The second way is to increase the vascularity, ie blood flow to the area. More blood= more nutrition for the newly moved fat cells= fat cells live.
- I would also venture to say the BRAVA helps keep you from doing things like putting pressure on your new fat in your breasts (tummy sleeping with the BRAVA on just can’t be done) and serves as a reminder, “Hey! you just had surgery! Take it easy!”
So who needs BRAVA?
- Tight tissue. This can be from having had a mastectomy and/or radiation; being 22 and having tight small breasts with great skin tone; or being 42 and having tight small breasts with okay skin tone (yes, these women do exist.)
- Poor blood supply to tissue. Particularly seen in radiation patients.
- Little fat to use to transfer. Translation in English: for you super skinny women who have almost no body fat, it is tough to harvest fat on you. We want to maximize the chances every little fat cell we get has a good chance of surviving after moving it.
So you either buy into the BRAVA thing or you don’t. I know from our plastic surgical meetings some doctors who did not use BRAVA noticed improvements in their patients when they started to use it. My own experience seeing pre and post op patients when I was in Miami was you could tell who was using it, and they seemed to get better faster results. Yes, BRAVA is a pain. But a good outcome from surgery is priceless. After all of my research and mythbusting of plastic surgery products and procedures which are hype and not science, I think BRAVA really does something.
