Stem Cell Applications in Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery
What is Stem Cell Therapy for Aesthetics?
In terms of Plastic Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery, stem cell applications can be evaluated in two main groups. The first of these is aesthetic applications. Stem cell applications have significant potential especially in the rejuvenation stage of the skin. Stem cell enriched fat injection applications are a more effective treatment method in eliminating the aged appearance of the face and hand skin. Using the patient's own tissues keeps the patient away from many side effects such as allergies. Permanent effects cannot be achieved in fillers and similar substances. However, when compared with the person's own tissues, both permanently and in terms of quantity, there is the potential to achieve much more and more effective results.
What is Stem Cell Therapy for Wounds?
The second area of application in Plastic Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery is a group of diseases where there are non-healing wounds, blood supply disorders or skin and subcutaneous tissue changes due to radiotherapy applications and where medicine is really challenged. Pressure sores (bed sores) are skin and/or subcutaneous tissue damage that occurs on bone protrusions, usually caused by pressure alone or friction and pressure together.
In patients confined to a bed (or chair), the pressure created by the body weight causes pressure on the soft tissues. Blood circulation is disrupted in these tissues that are squeezed between the bony protrusion and the bed, and eventually the tissues are damaged. With stem cell applications, vascularization and therefore circulation in the area where the wounds are located is increased, and the immune system is stimulated and supported, and tissue renewal is accelerated.
What is Stem Cell Treatment for the Face and Body?
In fillings made with unnatural products such as implants, the body reabsorbs up to 70% of the filling. And the body may have allergic reactions to these artificial substances. However, with fillings made using regenerative cells taken from the person's own body, this problem is minimized, and a more natural and permanent young appearance is achieved, far from artificiality. Therefore, instead of constantly repeated operations, single injections with regenerative cells are effective.
What is Stem Cell Treatment for Burns?
Severe burns and 3rd degree burns are one of the most difficult situations encountered by aesthetic surgery. Regenerative cell applications are performed to ensure that the patient regains a healthy appearance instead of chronic burn tissues. It is aimed to increase regeneration in damaged areas and to give the patient a healthier appearance by benefiting from the features of regenerative cells such as regulating inflammation, differentiating into cells belonging to the skin and subcutaneous tissues, increasing vascularization in damaged areas, synthesizing proteins such as collagen that provide skin strength and flexibility.
What is Stem Cell Treatment for Skin?
The skin is our organ consisting of different layers and performing very important vital activities. The inability of this complex organ to perform its functions can lead to serious consequences, including death. Especially in severe traumatic events such as burns, the cells called keratinocytes in our skin are seriously damaged. These cells, which start to divide from the lower parts of the skin and move towards the surface, have a key function in the growth of new skin and skin renewal with the chemical signals they secrete.
However, in cases where a significant part of the skin is lost, such as deep burn wounds, and there is no functional skin structure to guide them, keratinocytes do not work as expected and cannot produce the desired skin tissue.
Keratinocytes need an extracellular matrix structure made up of collagen produced by cells called fibroblasts in order to reproduce normally. When a new dermis (upper layer of the skin) is formed within the collagen layer implanted into the patient, fibroblast cells trigger the collapse of this externally obtained collagen scaffold, allowing the new tissue to take its place. Although the dermis layer is produced in this way, unfortunately this method does not meet the epidermis (lower part of the skin) layer needs of burn patients.
The potential and limits of tissue engineering in skin production are not limited to providing only structural and functional partial treatments. The goal of tissue engineering is to prevent deaths due to tissue and organ loss by producing the patient or damaged tissue/organ outside the body and transplanting it to the patient, and to increase the patient's quality of life.
In our center, we continue our work and research at full speed on this path, which we set out with the idea of producing structures that mimic natural tissue as much as possible by growing the cells required for the treatment of our patients on a scaffold structure through the right stimuli and using tissue engineering techniques such as 3D cell culture. These applications will be realized in the near future.
How is Fat Injection Performed to the Breast?
Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers in women. In the process that usually ends with the removal of the patient's breast, cancerous tissue under the breast and lymph nodes, today breast reconstruction is performed using regenerative cells. The patient's own fat tissue taken from the abdominal area is combined with stem cells obtained from the fat tissue to reconstruct the patient's breast tissue. Because implants such as silicone can cause allergic reactions in patients. In this way, both allergic reactions that implant materials can cause in the body are prevented and the breast tissue gains a more natural appearance.
