Liposuction . . . A Survey

A SURVEY of plastic surgeons suggests that more people die during liposuction than during many other kinds of operations, perhaps because the procedure is often done quickly and without due care in doctors’ offices instead of in the hospital.


“Outpatient elective lipoplasty may not be quite the safe procedure it is purported to be,” Dr. Frederick Grazer of Penn State University and Dr. Rudolph de Jong of the Thomas Jefferson Medical College wrote in their report, published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

Liposuction, referred to as lipoplasty by surgeons, has become the most common cosmetic plastic surgical procedure in the United States, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS).


ASPS members performed 109,353 lipoplasty procedures in 1996 — perhaps not surprising in a country where more than 50 percent of the adult population is overweight. Dr. Gerald Pitman of New York University, and a privately practicing plastic surgeon, said the problem is that it seems too easy.



“It is so conceptually simple that it lends itself to fantasy,” Pitman said. “You make a tiny incision in the skin, a quarter of inch , insert a tube and you vacuum out the fat. The physician who sees this as a money-maker thinks it’s easy, a piece of cake, but it’s not. Some surgeons try to do too much. They try to use it as a weight-loss technique.”


Grazer and De Jong polled 1,200 members of the American Society of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgeons (ASAPS), asking them if they knew of any patient who died after liposuction. The 917 who answered reported 95 deaths in more than 496,000 operations. That works out to one death in 5,224, or 19 per 100,000. The most common reported cause was a pulmonary thromboembolism — a blood clot. The generally accepted death rate for any kind of elective surgery — the kind not needed to save someone’s life — is 1 in 100,000.