A mother-of-three died Friday after undergoing a Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) at a clinic in Miami.
According to the Miami Herald, 28-year-old Danea Plasencia went into cardiac arrest and died at the hospital Friday morning—the same day she had the procedure at the MIA Aesthetics clinic.
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The Homicide Bureau is currently investigating.
“Throughout our years of operations and thousands of procedures performed, this is the first and only fatality we have endured,” the clinic—which advertises itself as “The Most Affordable Plastic Surgery Clinic in Miami, FL & Austin, TX”—wrote in a statement on social media. “Our team is devastated by this tragedy and feels that each and every one of our patients is part of our family. We strive to provide the most advanced plastic surgery treatment for our patients. Each of our surgeons is board-certified or board-eligible by the American Board of Plastic Surgery, and we are constantly evaluating our practices to ensure our patients receive the safest and best care. Despite these practices, serious surgery comes with the risk of rare, unintended and tragic results.”
La Jolla, CA plastic surgeon Robert Singer, MD echoes that sentiment, not just for BBLs but for any plastic surgery overall: “It’s devastating when any complication—especially a death—occurs from an elective surgery. Patients need to be fully informed of not only the benefits of a procedure, but also the potential complications,” he says. “To that end, the Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation (ASERF) and the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) are conducting additional studies and funding research to find the safest and best way to do these procedures.”
And there’s no denying that it’s a procedure that is a popular one—ASAPS reports that of the 26,774 buttock augmentation procedures performed in 2018, 94 percent consisted of fat transfer—but it also has “the greatest risk of death of any aesthetic surgical procedure from fat embolus syndrome,” Eugene, OR plastic surgeon Mark Jewell, MD stresses. “Patients must consider that risk when choosing to undergo this procedure.”
This isn’t the first time the red flag over BBLs has been raised. Earlier this month, a study, “Subcutaneous Migration: A Dynamic Anatomical Study of Gluteal Fat Grafting,” proposed a new standard of care for the surgery, stating: “These persuasive findings are profound enough to propose a new standard of care: no subfascial or intramuscular injection should be performed, and all injections should be performed exclusively into the subcutaneous tissue.”
Park City Utah plastic surgeon Renato Saltz, MD, who specializes in the procedure says that, currently, a huge amount of work is being done by the Intersociety Gluteal Fat Injection Task Force (ASAPS, ASPS and ISAPS) to get that public safety message across.
“This is an important occasion where the societies have gotten together for patient-safety purposes,” Dr. Saltz, who is a co-chair of the task force, says. “We’ve done all the anatomical studies, reviewed the autopsies with the pathologists in Miami and implemented new educational tools/modules to be presented in less than a week [at the annual ASAPS meeting] in New Orleans.”
Stay tuned to NewBeauty.com for more updates.
