Autologous Facial Fat Transfer: Soft Tissue Augmentation and Regnenerative Therapy.

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

• Level A · Stronger Clinical Evidence
• Level B · Emerging clinical evidence with positive signals
• Level C · Early human research exploring benefits
• Level D · Scientific groundwork from lab and animal studies
• Emerging · Emerging topic under active research

Abstract (original English)

Soft-tissue contour deficiencies depend on various origins including esthetics, congenital and post trauma asymmetries, post tumor defects, and chronic wound sequelae. Reconstructions or repairs are still a challenge today. Fat grafting is an old reconstructive technique dating back to 1893, but it has only recently become popular, especially among plastic surgeons. Being generally disregarded by medical practitioners for many years, adipose tissue has come into the spotlight because it is omnipresent and easily obtainable in substantial quantities with little patient discomfort and no relevant donor-site morbidity. Particularly, adipose tissue contains more multipotent cells per cc than bone marrow does. For example, 1 g of adipose tissue yields ∼5 × 10 stem cells, that is, 100-fold higher than the number of mesenchymal stem cells in 1 g of bone marrow. In reconstructive surgery, both adipose tissue aspiration and fat transfer have become typical surgical procedures. It is quite easy to harvest an abundant volume of tissue, obtaining a large amount of isolated stem and therapeutically active cells without needing cell expansion in tissue culture facilities. This procedure will likely mark the beginning of a new era in both regenerative medicine and facial-craniofacial reconstructions.

Evidence level

Evidence from laboratory and animal studies provides groundwork for understanding mechanisms and potential before human studies continue.

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