Liposuction if fraught with unwanted consequences that can turn other parts of a patient’s body fatter.
Even as the fat will not return to the areas of the body where it was removed from, usually the thighs, lower abdomen and buttocks, it will reappear elsewhere, typically around the shoulders, arms and upper abdomen, according to US researchers, the Daily Mail reports.
Liposuction is a simple but crude surgical process which literally sucks the fat out of chosen areas of the body. It is usually cosmetic surgical procedure in which excess fatty tissue is removed from a specific area of the body, such as the thighs or abdomen, by means of suction.
After the bruising and swelling from the operation heals, the areas operated visibly shrink to achieve what months of dieting has failed to do.
Last year, there were 3,369 liposuction operations carried out in Britain by members of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons.
The study was led by Teri Hernandez and Robert Eckel of the University of Colorado.
Eckel said fat “was redistributed upstairs,” mostly in the upper abdomen, but also around the shoulders and triceps of the arms.
The study involved 32 non-obese and healthy women of average weight and aged in their mid-30s.
While 14 were randomly selected to have a modest amount of fat removed by liposuction from their hips and thighs, the remaining 18 acted as ‘controls’ who did not have the procedure.
Measurements of all the women were carried out for six weeks, six months and a year, to monitor the distribution of fat.
After six weeks, the treated patients had lost 2.1 per cent of their fat, compared with 0.28 per cent in the control group. But this difference had disappeared at one year to the point where it was “no longer significant”.
The fat did not return to the same place, but in general was “redistributed from the thigh to the abdomen”.
The women undergoing liposuction were happy that fat had been removed permanently from their hated hips and thighs, even at the expense of transferring the fat elsewhere.
