A breast augmentation procedure in which fat from other parts of the body is transferred to the breasts causes / can cause false suspicion of breast cancer on follow-up mammograms, according to a study in the April issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).
The mammographic changes occurring after fat injection are indistinguishable from abnormalities associated with breast cancer, according to the study by Dr. Cong-Feng Wang of Meitan General Hospital, Beijing. Based on this “mammographic confusion,” the authors conclude that the use of autologous fat injection for breast augmentation should be “prohibited continuously.”
Before and After breast augmentation with breast implants
Microcalcifications Cause Confusion on Mammograms after Fat Injection
Dr. Wang and colleagues report on 48 women who underwent autologous fat injection for breast augmentation between 1999 and 2009. In this procedure, small amounts of fat obtained by liposuction from one area of the body (such as the hips or thighs) are injected to shape the breasts.
In the study, mammograms obtained some years after fat injection showed “clustered microcalcifications” in eight of the 48 women – a rate of 16.7 percent. In all eight cases, the microcalcifications were regarded as “highly suspicious” for breast cancer.
Alexandria, VA – New survey results released by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS) showed three-fourths of the procedures performed by the Academy’s surgeons in 2010 were non-surgical procedures, highlighting a trend that more people are choosing non-surgical procedures to delay more invasive surgical procedures. The survey results also showed that the number of procedures performed annually has risen 45 percent over the last two years, with a 16 percent increase in non-surgical procedures.
A majority of surgical procedures, including facelift, revision surgery, rhinoplasty, forehead lift, chin augmentation, lip augmentation, and scar revision, increased in cost from 2009, which may be one reason why people opted for less invasive surgeries. In addition, surgeons reported performing fewer lip augmentations, hair transplants and collagen/cosmoderm/cosmoplast procedures in 2010.
“Non-surgical cosmetic procedures are an excellent option for some people, with the added benefits of lower costs and shorter recovery time; two things that are consistently important to those considering facial plastic surgery,” said Jonathan M. Sykes, M.D., President of the AAFPRS. “We have been seeing a trend over the past few years that people who want to look and feel younger and rejuvenated are turning to non-surgical, less invasive procedures to obtain the refreshed look they want.”
The most common non-surgical procedures last year were Botox and hyaluronic acid injections. Surgery is still popular, with the most popular cosmetic surgical procedures in 2010 being rhinoplasty, facelift, and blepharoplasty (eyelid surgery).
Plastic Surgery Team Perform First Full Face Transplant in USA
A Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) plastic surgery team, led by Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, performed the first full face transplant in USA last week, the second face transplant procedure to be performed at BWH.
The team of more than 30 physicians, nurses, anesthesiologists and residents worked for more than 15 hours to replace the facial area of patient Dallas Wiens, including the nose, lips, facial skin, muscles of facial animation and the nerves that power them and provide sensation.
- Bohdan Pomahac, MD, of BWH Plastic Surgery
“Today’s tremendous news marks a new milestone in Brigham and Women’s legacy in transplant surgery. The pioneering achievement accomplished by the entire transplant team is a gift made possible by the most selfless act one human being can do for another, organ donation,” said Betsy Nabel, MD, president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“This remarkable, anonymous gift is another example of the life-affirming power of organ and tissue donation,” said Richard S. Luskin, president and CEO of New England Organ Bank. “As always we are immensely grateful to the donor and the donor family for their generosity.”
Below you will find the press conference highlights:
Researchers at the University of Granada have developed a new method for predicting the precise shade that a teeth bleaching will bring about for a patient’s teeth. What is innovative about this method is that it allows researchers to successfully predict the outcome of a bleaching treatment, which will have a significant impact on such treatments, which are becoming more frequent.
At present, dental offices routinely employ carbomide peroxide bleaching agents for tooth discoloration. As bleaching treatments have soft side effects –all of them temporary and mild– and are relatively cost-effective, they have become very popular.
While bleaching treatments have been long applied, one of its main problems has been the inability to predict the outcome of the process. This means that, so far, dentists have been unable to predict the results for patients’ teeth. This means that dental physicians could not inform their patients on the shade improvement that the treatment would bring about, which was a limitation to the therapy.
Teeth Bleaching
The study was conducted by Janiley Santana Díaz, at the Department of Stomatology of the University of Granada and was coordinated by professors Rosa Mª Pulgar Encinas, Mª Del Mar Pérez Gómez and Luis Javier Herrera Maldonado. Using a fuzzy rule system, scientists had a first approach to the shade improvement that teeth can get after undergoing a 20% carbamide peroxide treatment (Opalescence® PF 20%, Ultradent) two hours a day for two weeks.
Participants
For the purpose of this study, authors took a sample of 53 subjects that subsequently underwent a teeth bleaching treatment. Before the bleaching treatment, participants answered a questionnaire on their eating habits so that scientists analyzed whether such habits had any impact on the prediction models. The researchers found that eating habits are not relevant to such models, so these factors where not considered in the study.
To illustrate the shade change expected after the teeth bleaching treatment, the University of Granada researchers designed a fuzzy system that allows to associate these instrumental measures to the commercial shade guides typically used at dental offices to identify the before-and-after tooth color.
Such association allows to establish a series of objective guidelines that, once the before-tooth color is identified with the closest shade of the guide, will allow both dentist and patient to predict the color that the teeth will get after the treatment.
All in all, researchers warn that, in the long term and given the limitation of any clinical trial, a wider range of patients and initial tooth colors would be required to obtain a more precise fuzzy system.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Botox injection (onabotulinumtoxinA) to prevent headaches in adult patients with chronic migraine. Chronic migraine is defined as having a history of migraine and experiencing a headache on most days of the month.
“Chronic migraine is one of the most disabling forms of headache,” said Russell Katz, M.D., director of the Division of Neurology Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “Patients with chronic migraine experience a headache more than 14 days of the month. This condition can greatly affect family, work, and social life, so it is important to have a variety of effective treatment options available.”
Migraine headaches are described as an intense pulsing or throbbing pain in one area of the head. The headaches are often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light and sound. Migraine is three times more common in women than in men. Migraine usually begins with intermittent headache attacks 14 days or fewer each month (episodic migraine), but some patients go on to develop the more disabling chronic migraine.
Nobel Prize for the development of human In Vitro Fertilization
Robert Edwards is awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for the development of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) therapy. His achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition afflicting a large proportion of humanity including more than 10% of all couples worldwide.
As early as the 1950s, Edwards had the vision that IVF could be useful as a treatment for infertility. He worked systematically to realize his goal, discovered important principles for human fertilization, and succeeded in accomplishing fertilization of human egg cells in test tubes (or more precisely, cell culture dishes). His efforts were finally crowned by success on 25 July, 1978, when the world’s first “test tube baby” was born. During the following years, Edwards and his co-workers refined IVF technology and shared it with colleagues around the world.
Approximately four million individuals have so far been born following IVF. Many of them are now adult and some have already become parents. A new field of medicine has emerged, with Robert Edwards leading the process all the way from the fundamental discoveries to the current, successful IVF therapy. His contributions represent a milestone in the development of modern medicine.
Infertility – a medical and psychological problem
More than 10% of all couples worldwide are infertile. For many of them, this is a great disappointment and for some causes lifelong psychological trauma. Medicine has had limited opportunities to help these individuals in the past. Today, the situation is entirely different. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is an established therapy when sperm and egg cannot meet inside the body.
Basic research bears fruit
The British scientist Robert Edwards began his fundamental research on the biology of fertilization in the 1950s. He soon realized that fertilization outside the body could represent a possible treatment of infertility. Other scientists had shown that egg cells from rabbits could be fertilized in test tubes when sperm was added, giving rise to offspring. Edwards decided to investigate if similar methods could be used to fertilize human egg cells.
It turned out that human eggs have an entirely different life cycle than those of rabbits. In a series of experimental studies conducted together with several different co-workers, Edwards made a number of fundamental discoveries. He clarified how human eggs mature, how different hormones regulate their maturation, and at which time point the eggs are susceptible to the fertilizing sperm. He also determined the conditions under which sperm is activated and has the capacity to fertilize the egg. In 1969, his efforts met with success when, for the first time, a human egg was fertilized in a test tube.
In spite of this success, a major problem remained. The fertilized egg did not develop beyond a single cell division. Edwards suspected that eggs that had matured in the ovaries before they were removed for IVF would function better, and looked for possible ways to obtain such eggs in a safe way.
Rosemont, IL – Risk factors for venous thromboembolism after total hip replacement (THR) surgery were identified in a new study published in the September 2010 issue of The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery (JBJS). While the rate of thromboembolism has been significantly reduced through medication, understanding the risk factors could further reduce the likelihood of patients developing this potentially fatal complication.
Two of the most common manifestations of a thromboembolism include:
* Deep vein thrombosis (DVT), in which the blood clot forms in a deep vein, commonly in the thigh or calf; and
* Pulmonary embolism (PE), in which the blood clot breaks free and travels through the veins.
Any surgery often carries the risk of a thromboembolism, especially orthopaedic surgery involving the lower extremities, like the hip or knee. Because of this risk, THR patients are usually treated with medications designed to prevent it from occurring. Despite that, this study found that approximately 1 percent of patients who took the medication still suffered a DVT or PE within 90 days of surgery. Read the rest of this entry »
Botulinum Toxin May Offer Temporary Drooling Relief in Children With Neurological Disorders
Chicago — Botulinum toxin treatment appears to offer a temporary, short-term solution to relieve drooling in children diagnosed with certain neurological disorders, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of Otolaryngology—Head & Neck Surgery, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
“Recent estimates suggest a prevalence of [drooling in] nearly 60 percent in children in special care school, of which 33 percent could be classified as severe,” the authors write as background in the article. “Depending on the associated neurological disorder, cognitive abilities and oral motor function, affected children may experience anything from stigmatization and social neglect to numerous daily clothing changes, perioral dermatitis [skin irritation around the mouth], aspiration pneumonia or even dehydration.”
Arthur R. T. Scheffer, M.D., of Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and colleagues studied 131 children diagnosed as having cerebral palsy or other non-progressive neurological disorder, and who also had moderate to severe drooling, to test the efficacy of botulinum toxin when used as a treatment for drooling in children with neurological disorders. For the injection of the toxin, children were under general anesthesia and the injections were limited to the submandibular glands, which are responsible for 70 percent of resting saliva production. The sublingual glands and parotid glands were not treated.
Of the 131 children participating in the study, 77 were boys and 54 girls with an average age of 10.9 (age range was 3 to 27 years). About 90 percent of the patients were diagnosed as having cerebral palsy. The researchers developed a drooling quotient to assess the severity of drooling, and this measurement served as the primary measure for both efficacy and duration of botulinum toxin treatment. At the two-month follow-up, the average drooling quotient had decreased from 28.8 (on a scale of zero to 100) at the start of the study (baseline) to 15.5 and 61 patients experienced a 50 percent reduction in the drooling quotient from baseline. At the eight-month follow up, the drooling quotient increased slightly to 18.7, but the authors noted there was still a significant difference compared to baseline assessment.
Additionally, patients benefited from the botulinum toxin injection for an average of 22 weeks and 25 percent of initial responders (11.3 percent of entire population) still showed a clinically significant response to the treatment after 33 weeks, with a handful of patients experiencing continued relief from drooling after one year. “Secondary beneficial effects following injection included improved oral hygiene (reduced perioral dermatitis or reduction in halitosis) in four patients (3.1 percent) and improved speech in another four patients. These effects generally disappeared after eight months.”
The authors conclude that their findings “indicate that most patients who initially respond well to injection can expect an effect to last between 19 and 33 weeks. Although the 46.6 percent success rate might appear low, its safety and efficacy make botulinum toxin a useful first-line invasive treatment if conservative measures have failed.”
Sublimis Argentina offers botox cosmetic injection abroad. Feel free to contact us for more information
Entries (RSS)