Video Transcription

Dr. Brian Pinsky: Hello, I’m Dr. Brian Pinsky with the New York Plastic Surgical Group. I wanted to go into a little more detail about some other types of procedures or other types of issues we address with post-weight loss body contouring. We discussed previously in a video about the abdomen and trunk. Now I would like to address the breast and upper body. Most people with a lot of weight loss tend to have these similar issues all over their body, not just in the trunk, not just in the arms. But these procedures take a long time in the operating room and are often too much to combine into one. So we tend to separate them based on body area.

The next most common area probably after the trunk is the breasts. Patients often have a significant breast ptosis or droopiness that occurs with deflation of the breasts and loss of volume. Most commonly, we’ll do what’s called a breast lift because oftentimes they’ve lost significant amount of volume, which is present. And patients that have a lot of droopiness and that still have a lot of heaviness or volume and want to go down in size may be candidates for a breast reduction, which is something that insurance may cover. A breast lift, unfortunately, is considered cosmetic. This would be just removing of extra skin but maintaining the volume that’s present.

And a lot of times we’ll do something called an auto augmentation, where we’re actually take the skin or a tissue from underneath the armpit in the bra roll area and use that to actually augment the size and shape of the breast. That’s a nice option for weight loss. And this can be plus or minus the addition of an implant in certain circumstances, or even fat transfer into the breast in certain circumstances to even add more volume depending on the desires of the patient.

The scars here typically go around the nipple, straight, under, down and underneath the fold, so it looks like an anchor or an upside down letter T. In patients that have a lot of droopiness or excess skin that goes around the back, we can include what’s called an upper body lift. So similar to a lower body lift, it’s a scar that carries all the way around the trunk in the bra line, which will address the extra skin of the upper back as well as the armpit area, and that’s often included in with a breast lift.