Aging is a "disease" which
does not leave hopes for recovery. What about prevention? It might sound
provocative - the idea of a fountain of youth, the picture of Dorian Gray.
Eye lid stretching,
forehead-, facial and neck stretching - commonly known as lifting - is
increasingly gaining ground. In 2003 alone, 120.000 face lift operations
were registered in the US. And another trend is taking shape. While the
majority of plastic surgery patients used to be over 60 years of age, there
is now an increasing number of younger patients in their mid-forties,
sometimes even in their early thirties.
The question occurs whether
face-lifting at such an early age is at all reasonable. Can it ethically be
justified? The only rule that exists in the field of medicine is that there
is no rule. There is, for example, a disease called progery which gives a
child the appearance of an old person. The youngest face-lifting patient our
co-editor
Gottfried Lemperle ever had was a 23-year old student of medicine. She was
fully satisfied with the results. And that is the only argument that counts.
If we conduct face-lifting
surgery on a 60-year old or on a 70-year old, the amplitude can cause a
rejuvenation effect of 15-20 years. The younger our patients are, the
smaller the effect of rejuvenation will be. There are not many traces of age
to be modified on a 33-year old. Yet his/her features can be beautified,
harmonised. There is another advantage of face-lifting at an early age:
traces of age will take effect later in life. This is due to the fact that
the deep level (SMAS) is lifted and fixated with lasting effect.
The media often causes
speculation about how long the effects of a certain method of plastic
surgery would last: 3, 5, 10, 12, 15 years ...? Bob Flowers is a well-known
plastic surgeon from Honolulu, Hawaii. He had a lucky idea when he found two
female twin sisters in the US: one of them had undergone facelifting, the
other - because of health, family, financial reasons - had not. Flowers
organised a meeting between the two sisters, placed them on his couch and
took photographs: 10, 20, and even 30 years after plastic surgery, the
differences between the two sisters were still visible. One could easilly
tell which one had undergone plastic surgery.
The effects of face-lifting
last forever. The skin and the SMAS-layers, parts of which we had removed,
do not grow back, nor do they regenerate. The timelapse has everlasting
effects. Yet we have to warn our patients: we can turn back time on the
biological clock but we cannot stop it, it will go on ticking. If we conduct
rejuvenation surgery on a 60- year old which makes him/her look like 45
again, fifteen years onwards he/she will not look 45 anymore, rather 60.
Providing there is sufficient zest for life and good health, a second
face-lift surgery can be conducted. A second surgery represents a completely
new operation, not a correction, of the first.
D.Panfilov
34
years old female patient could not be much rejuvenated but beautified
