An academic paper was published recently in the medical journal Annals of Oncology documenting an important safety factor for the fat grafting procedure. The full journal article can be read here…
[1] “Locoregional recurrence risk after lipofilling in breast cancer patients”.
Annals of Oncology doi:10.1093/annonc/mdr158
One criticism of fat grafting (referred to as ‘lipofilling’ in the paper) to the breast for both reconstructive and cosmetic purposes has been the behavior of the transplanted fat derived stem cells. There has been concern that stem cells transplanted into the breast might ‘turn on’ cellular signals that make otherwise normal breast tissue turn into cancer. This concern was raised many years ago, and is part of the basis for the American Society of Plastic Surgery’s hesitancy to support the procedure (until very recently). However, clinical papers published within the past two years that have looked at large numbers of patients that have had fat grafting to the breast have not supported these, and other concerns about fat grafting to the breast.
This recent paper, out of the European Institute of Oncology, fails to show an increase in breast cancer recurrence amongst women that have had breast cancer procedures such as lumpectomy, quadrentectomy and mastectomy and also had breast reconstruction using fat grafting techniques. This case-control clinical study compared the fat grafting group to a large cohort of breast cancer patients that received breast cancer surgery without a fat grafting reconstructive procedure.
The natural history of invasive breast cancer treated with all type of breast cancer surgery is a local recurrence rate of about 5%. This study fails to show an increase in local recurrence rates of invasive breast cancer amongst women who, on average, were 56 months (4.6 years) post-op from cancer surgery and 26 months (2.1 years) post-op from fat grafting. This is encouraging news !!
Of course, longer term follow-up studies are needed (5 years, 10 years, 15 years). At least for the short and medium terms, fat grafting to the breast does not appear to result in increased local recurrence rates for invasive breast cancer who undergo fat grafting as part of their breast reconstruction procedure.
We offer fat grafting to the breast for cosmetic and reconstructive purposes, and will continue to do so, based on encouraging clinical results such as this one.
