Published Research Papers

When I was considering my surgery I was interested to get into the research.  I wanted the person carrying out my surgery to be using techniques with an evidence base behind them, and to have carried out follow ups on their own patients and reflected on their techniques.  

I felt all surgeons can show you photos of patients who have experienced good results (at least I hope they can!) but how long does it last?  What does the future hold?  How do different methods of liposuction compare?  

I reached the conclusion that there is sufficient evidence of reduced pain, reduced sensitivity, increased mobility and improved quality of life lasting multiple years, and that most patients were not reporting return of the fat to treated areas.  

I thought it might be useful to post links to the research papers I've looked at - clearly I read Professor Schmeller/Hanse-Klinik's publications most carefully ;)

You can find papers by going to a site like PubMed and entering a search term like lipodema or liposuction.  The search results will then give you titles as links which bring up abstracts (or summaries) of the papers and on the right hand side of the page it will tell you where you can access the full paper from.  Via the pubmed site you can purchase the full published papers as a patient for around £2.50 per paper.  

There is a 25 patient follow up study out to six months by Rapprich S, Dingler A, Podda M. which had evidence of pain reduction.  

Professor Schmeller has co-authored papers going back to 2005 or so on lipodema and liposuction.  His 2006 paper had 28 patients benefiting around 12 months later.  

Professor Schmeller has carried out two much larger follow ups, most recently along with Dr Baumgartner from Hanse (and another author M Hueppe) where they followed 85 people out to 8 years (December 2015 British Journal of Dermatology).  His previous paper for the same journal in 2012 with Dr Meier-Vollrath (looks like she worked at Hanse then) and M Hueppe had an average of 4 year follow up data for 112 patients.  

The results were consistent across the two pieces of research, showing long term consistent benefits from tumescent liposuction:

"All patients showed a distinct reduction of subcutaneous fatty tissue (average 9846mL per person) with improvement of shape and normalization of body proportions. Additionally, they reported either a marked improvement or a complete disappearance of spontaneous pain, sensitivity to pressure, oedema, bruising, restriction of movement and cosmetic impairment, resulting in a tremendous increase in quality of life; all these complaints were reduced significantly (P<0·001). Patients with lipoedema stage II and III showed better improvement compared with patients with stage I. Physical decongestive therapy could be either omitted (22·4% of cases) or continued to a much lower degree. No serious complications (wound infection rate 1·4%, bleeding rate 0·3%) were observed following surgery." Quoted from abstract of 2012 paper by Schmeller et al.