"Fatty thighs to give breasts uplift"

Sarah-Kate Templeton Health Correspondent

It is the cosmetic treatment many women have dreamed of. Surgeons have carried out “natural” breast enlargements by removing unwanted fat from women’s hips and thighs and transplanting it on to their busts.

The procedure allows surgeons to redistribute fat around women’s bodies sculpting their figures into an ideal shape.
The operations have already been carried out on dozens of women in America and British clinics are planning to offer the technique.

Dr Sydney Coleman, a world- renowned plastic surgeon from New York, has performed about 30 breast augmentations using women’s own fat.

Coleman said: “The most common cases have been in women who have big love handles and want to transfer this fat to their breast.

“I recently operated on a mother and daughter who both had big love handles. It was easy just to remove it and place it on the chest.”

If the procedure is perfected it could end the need for silicon implants.
Implants need to be replaced every ten years. Scarring can occur around the implant causing infections, pain and discomfort and many women are reluctant to have artificial materials introduced into their bodies.

Implants can also look and feel unnatural. Earlier this year fashion designer Tom Ford criticised their appearance.
He said: “We can send a man to the moon, but when it comes to designing breast implants, it looks like they use grapefruits sliced in half. Why can’t they give them a natural slope?”

Thomas Baker, a professor of plastic surgery at Miami University Medical School, has performed 28 breast augmentations using women’s own fat over the last two years.

Baker said: “The breasts look normal and feel normal. They are not like breast implants that can become very hard.”
Baker believes the technique will be ideal for women requesting a modest breast augmentation of about one to one and a half cup sizes because a smaller volume of fat is needed.

Until now surgeons have been put off the technique because it is long and laborious. Only very small amounts of fat can be aspirated in one go. The fat then needs to be processed before it can be re-injected into the breast. If too much tissue is removed in one go, it is impossible to maintain the blood supply to the fat cells and they die.

The operation can take over three hours which is about three times as long as inserting a silicon implant.
Baker and his collaborators in the US and Italy are now managing to speed up the procedure after developing a machine that can help them remove the fat safely and quickly.

Baker said: “You cannot just inject a big lump of fat and hope it will survive.
“We aspirate the fat from other parts of the body with very minimal suction to avoid destroying the cells. We then use a very small needle to inject the fat into about 12 or 14 ports around the breast.

“The procedure takes us three to three and a half hours. With the machine we have developed we think we can cut the operating times down to an hour or and hour and a half.”

These practical advances have made the technique appealing to British clinics. The Harley Medical Group, one of Britain’s largest cosmetic clinic chains, is planning to offer the procedure.

Mel Braham, chair of the Harley Medical Group, said: "Once scientific clinical trials have taken place and they are peer- reviewed in established medical publications, then this is something that would be of great interest to the Harley Medical Group.”

Concerns about complications with cancer scans led the American Society of Plastic Surgeons to issue a statement advising against the technique when it was first attempted in the 1980s.

Surgeons now insist, however, that more advanced screening techniques can differentiate between harmless calcium and tumours.

Dolores Collazo, 28, a medical administrator from Miami, had a breast augmentation using fat from her thigh in January and is pleased with the results.

Collazo used spare fat on her legs to increase her bust from a size 36A to a size 36B.
She said: “I regard breast implants as foreign bodies and the procedure would need to be repeated every ten years. This allows me to use my own body fat.”