Liposuction may help your heart

Liposuction may do more than just slim down your waistline - it might also help your heart, a new study shows.

Within three months of the slenderizing procedure, patients’ triglyceride levels had dropped an average of 43 percent, according to a report presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons in Denver.

Triglycerides, fats in the blood, have been linked in other studies to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

The new findings were a surprise even to the study’s author, Dr. Eric Swanson, a plastic surgeon in private practice in Leawood, Kansas.

“It made sense that if you reduced fat mass that might reduce circulating triglycerides,” Swanson said. “But I didn’t think the effect on the body’s fat scores would be enough to make a significant difference in triglycerides.”

The prospective study looked at 322 consecutive patients (270 women and 52 men) who came in for liposuction and/or a tummy tuck. One reason Swanson didn’t expect to see a strong link between liposuction and triglyceride levels was that most of the patients - 78 percent - were in the normal to overweight range. Just 22 percent were obese.

“A 43 percent drop in triglycerides was dramatic and surprising,” Swanson said. The procedure also led to a decrease in the numbers of white blood cells circulating in the blood, Swanson said. And this suggests that the removal of fat is reducing inflammation, which is also thought to be involved in the development of cardiovascular disease.

While cautioning that the study is small, cardiologist Dr. Nehal N. Mehta said its findings were very interesting and should prompt more research on the subject.

We already know that fat cells spew out inflammatory chemicals that have systemic effects, said Mehta, a preventive cardiologist at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Liposuction, also known as lipoplasty or liposculpture, is an operation that sucks excess fat out from under your skin. It can remove small amounts of fat that you haven’t been able to shift with diet and exercise. Liposuction is not a treatment for weight control or obesity, and it can’t remove cellulite or stretch marks.

Liposuction can be done on your abdomen (tummy), hips, buttocks, neck, arms, thighs, knees and ankles.

There is a limit to the amount of fat that can be safely removed from any area of your body, so it may not be possible to reduce an area as much as you would like. Your body won’t replace the fat cells, so you should have a long-lasting change in your body shape, especially if you exercise, eat a healthy diet and maintain a healthy weight after liposuction. However, putting on weight can cause the remaining fat cells to change.

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