The boom in weight-loss drugs has boosted popularity of surgeries to remove extra skin all over the body, reported cnn.com.
The leading US news service highlighted the case of Leah Rae Russell, 31, who lost more than 200 pounds (91kg) over a decade, but said she wasn’t able to fully appreciate her accomplishment until she took a final step: tightening and removing about 3 pounds (1.4kg) of skin hanging from her chest and stomach.
Russell – who fell from a high of 340 pounds to 133 – said the surgeries were necessary for her self-esteem but also because ‘the apron of skin hanging from her midsection would rub and cause rashes; a second roll of skin above that was also causing problems.’
She summed up: ‘My belly button would be bleeding and raw all the time. No matter how often you’re showering or powdering or anything like that, it gets to a point you have so much excess skin, there’s a limitation to how much you could just treat it without getting rid of it.’
Thanks to popular new drugs for weight loss and diabetes – an estimated 1 in 8 US adults has used Ozempic or a similar GLP-1 medication – demand for procedures to lift and tighten excess skin has surged.
Professor Steven Dayan, plastic surgeon at the University of Illinois, confirmed: ‘The numbers are overwhelming. We’re going to see a huge influx of patients who are interested in aesthetic treatments, and we need to know how to treat them best.’
According to the American Society of Plastic Surgery (ASPS), in 2022 – the year after the first GLP-1 medication for weight loss Wegovy was approved in the US – breast lifts and tummy tucks (the two procedures Russell had) increased 30 percent and 37 percent respectively from 2019; upper arm lifts, to get rid of flapping skin sometimes called angel wings, increased 23 percent in the same period; and facelifts, lower body lifts and buttock lifts also saw similar increases. These procedures ticked up again in 2023.
Plastic surgeon and ASPS spokesperson Dr Michele Shermak said the popularity of Ozempic and similar medications is fuelling the trend and ‘we are lifting from head to toe.’
She noted these patients are often younger – in their 30s and 40s – than those who traditionally sought face lifts and other skin-tightening procedures.
But Prof Dayan said the patients he’s seen after weight loss ‘sometimes don’t get the results they want from procedures to tighten their skin because the weight loss has changed it, making it thinner and less elastic. There’s a limit to how much better you can get these people, so their expectations may not be in check with what they want.’
Doctors also warn some risks of skin removal surgeries include bleeding and blood clots, infections, bruising and swelling – and patients also need to ‘figure out how to cope with some pretty intense activity limitations during the early part of their healing’; people who have tummy tucks, for example, are advised to ‘stay hunched over for two weeks after their procedures while the skin heals’.
