Scarless Breast Surgery in Katy, Texas?

August 20th, 2008

I hate to lure you in here under false pretense, but any person considering breast surgery should know that there is no such thing as scarless surgery. Some procedures may use different scars or fewer scars, but any operation that cuts through the skin in a human being (embryos are an interesting exception) will leave a scar. If there is no way you can accept a scar on the breast, you shouldn’t have a cosmetic breast operation. When it comes to breast augmentation, the most common approach is through an incision about 3.5 – 4.0 cm long in the inframammary fold (the crease just under the breast). I just returned from a meeting related to breast surgery and body contouring and an electronic survey of the board certified plastic surgeons in the audience disclosed that 87% of us use this approach as our standard way of doing the case. I was interested to note that there were data presented that suggested the approaches using incisions in the nipple, arm pit (trans-axillary) and umbilicus (TUBA) are associated with more problems and higher ultimate revision rates than the inframammary approach site. Additionally, if there are any problems encountered during the operation, such as excessive bleeding, when using one of the more remote approaches (trans-axillary and TUBA) then an inframammary incision must be performed in order to control the situation thereby leaving two scars on the breast. Breast augmentation carries with it a reasonable risk that the patient will have a revision operation at some time in her future due to things like rupture of the implant or tightening of scar tissue around the implant (capsular contracture) and these operations frequently are not able to be performed through these remote incision sites, again, leading to an incision on the breast.

As you can no doubt tell, my preferred access site for breast augmentation is the inframammary site. I feel that from here I can offer my patients the best result attainable because it gives me the most precise control over the technical aspects of the operation and avoids opening the breast ducts (which the nipple approach may do) and exposing the implant to bacteria. Some research supports that exposing the implant to possible bacterial contamination by passing it through surgically opened ducts (as is commonly done using the nipple approach) leads to a higher capsular contracture rate.

In the end, I want to provide my Katy and West Houston patients with the highest quality breast augmentation available using state-of-the-art techniques that research has shown leads to more consistent results with lower re-operation rates and fewer complications

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