Stem cells are the rage. They are exciting. At my recent meeting one of the speakers gave an interesting talk where he waded through all the verbage out there and summarized –what do they mean when they say stem cell? He searched online for stem cell, and found multiple actual procedures.
- cell enriched fat
- “growth factors” (not defined)
- stem cells
- fat alone
- fat enriched with extra stem cells
He then did a medical literature review of 9000 references. What did he find? Only 20 articles discussed stem cells with fat grafting, and most dealt with fat grafting to the breast. Only three articles discussed the face, one of which was a case report.
Hmmm.
How can a doctor declare “Stem cell facelift!” and state it returns your skin to its prior youthfulness and plumpness when there are no scientific papers to back it up? And what is this stem cell? Is it the naturally occuring stem cells in fat and this is really just fat grafting like so many other plastic surgeons do? Are they adding stem cells to the fat (like they do with machines where you harvest a liter of fat and spin it down to get a tiny plug of stem cells?)
ASAPS and ASPS released a joint statement stating the results of stem cells are promising, but not proven. Any claims a doctor makes on what it can do cannot be scientifically supported yet.
They likely do hold promise in the future. All of us who have done fat grafting to the face have seen impressive changes. They are subtle, over time, but clearly there. I had a patient who had bad acne scarring of the cheek. We did fat grafting to her cheek and a year later noticed the acne pitting was softer, the skin quality better. Dr. Coleman in New York has a great slide of a woman’s nose where he fat grafted it and years later when she returned a big scar on the top of her nose had miraculously disappeared. There are stem cells naturally occuring in fat- in fact many think fat is one of the best sources of adult stem cells in the body.
We are at the beginning of understanding stem cells and what they may mean. I am proud of our society for approaching these new advancements with thoughtfulness. They want to maintain integrity, trust, honesty. In order for us to make claims of the miracles of stem cells, we need evidence based medicine. We need to do good studies to evaluate what it is and what is happening.
Beware of the doctors who are better marketers than honest doctors. As our speaker said, on the “stem cell facelift” webpage, in fine print at the bottom it says, “No claims are made these procedures are proved by FDA or effective.”