Associations of Hearing Loss Defined by Updated World Health Organization Criteria With Socioeconomic Status and Health Check-Up-Related Factors: A Population-Based Cross-Sectional Study in Japan.

Gluteal autologous fat transfer (AFT) procedures, colloquially known as “Brazilian butt lifts,” are gaining prominence in the aesthetic surgery community. A surgical technique to augment a patient’s buttocks, AFT involves abdominal liposuction followed by re-injection of the fat into the gluteal area. The procedure has soared in popularity as beauty standards have shifted and cosmetic surgery has become increasingly transparent on social media platforms, with reported cases in the United States increasing from 614 in 2002 to 61,387 by 2021, a nearly 10,000% increase. – The procedure can cost thousands of dollars and requires significant postoperative care; in addition to typical postsurgical needs, patients often require aggressive lymphatic massage and have significant movement restrictions that include sleeping face down, avoiding sitting, and wearing compression garments. Plastic surgeons have been investigating complications of gluteal AFT for more than a decade. – The most dangerous complication of gluteal AFT is pulmonary fat embolism. This type of embolism may also occur when fat is injected or absorbed into a blood vessel during the re-injection phase of an AFT procedure. It has even been suggested that moving the patient into a supine position postoperatively can put enough pressure on newly deposited adipose tissue to shift it into the bloodstream. Theoretically, ultrasound guidance should decrease this risk, which formed the basis for a 2022 Florida Board of Medicine regulation requiring its use. Pulmonary fat emboli from gluteal AFT are rare (1:1,030 procedures) but life-threatening. Mortality rates are as high as 50% , —the highest for any aesthetic procedure. Miami, Florida, has become a popular destination for these procedures. Unfortunately, as cases have increased, South Florida has also seen an increase in well-publicized poor outcomes. When seven gluteal AFT patients died in one year alone, the Florida Board issued an emergency regulation restricting fat injection to the subcutaneous space as opposed to injecting into muscle. Despite this new regulation, at least 13 deaths were reported in Miami-Dade County from 2019–2022, the three years immediately following the implementation of the subcutaneous injection regulation. These deaths led to another wave of regulations, the impact of which has yet to be reported.