Does fat grafting have any influence on breast cancer?

If you had to remove breast tissue due to breast cancer, then you would need to have fat grafting to cover up the loss caused due to the incision of the breast tissue. This is a widely applied approach.

Fat grafting requires injecting half-liquid substance into the body, and is very simple and quick. There is no need for incision which also means that there is less chance of complications. Also, there is not much scar therefore it is widely used.
However, there was a report stating that it might lead to formation of cancer cells based on tests conducted on animals (mostly on scientific magazines).

In humans, fatty tissue cells or adipose tissue cells practically injected into the body. Even if you hear that the procedure is stem cell transplantation, you don't use pure stem cells but  extract and inject adult stem cells. However, it is impossible to conclude that the result of injection of fatty tissue in the animal experiments is directly linked with humans as the animal experiments used is stem cell transplantation..

Anyway, we need to study further on whether the fat grafted actually has any influence on the cancer redevelopment if the fat was used to replace the loss of tissue cells in breast cancer surgery.



Dr. Jean Yves Petit from Europe Cancer Center in Milan, Italy reported on the “Fat grafting after invasive breast cancer, Case control experiment” on the latest edition of Plastic and reconstructive surgery.

This experiment was conducted on 322 patients who received fat grafting as breast reconstruction surgery from 2006 ~ 2013. Also there might be some differences on how much cancers cells are left in the body in those patients who got complete incision compared to those who got partial incision, therefore, the experiments looked at the difference between the two groups as well.

The monitoring period on the average was about 4.6 years after the fat grafting. There was no differences in the recurrence in the vicinity of the previous lesion, occurrence of the opposite phase, or occurrence of the axillary and lymph nodes in the event of the transfer.

There was absolutely no evidence that the fat grafting used for reconstruction had any negative influence of the recurrence of the breast cancer therefore, Dr. Petit and others concluded and reported that fat grafting is a safe method for breast cancer reconstruction.

Fat grafting can be applied on any part of the body. It can be applied on the breasts as well.

Breast cancer incidence rate is rather high in US and EU therefore it is a threatening disease to women. It is also the most common malignant disease on women therefore I think that hospitals in our country also needs to actively conduct studies on it.

Thank you for reading. Have a great day.