February 14, 2011
Deadly desire for bigger buttocks
Buttocks-boosting shots have become one of the most conspicuously dangerous of cosmetic procedures, but patients keep getting them.
News stories of patients dying in a quest for a bigger booty keep turning up. The deaths tend to occur in patients seeking low-priced alternatives to more costly treatments such as buttock implants.
The latest fatality was a British woman who traveled from London last week to get buttocks-enhancement injections of silicone in a hotel room at a Hampton Inn near the Philadelphia airport.
Police said Claudia Aderotimi, 20, apparently arranged for the procedure over the Internet.
Autopsy results have not been released, but if the incident followed the pattern of similar butt-injection deaths, the silicone entered her bloodstream and caused a fatal pulmonary embolism — a blockage in the main artery in the lungs.
Friends said the woman, also known as Claudia Adusei and Carmella James, was an aspiring hip-hop singer who had been rejected for a music video because her rear was too flat. Early interest in her talents allegedly faded when producers discovered that she had used butt-padded pants in a rap-music video audition.
Other recent butt-injection fatalities include:
- Mayra Lissette Contreras, 22, of Pacoima, Calif., who died in July 2010, apparently from respiratory problems, after receiving silicone shots from an unlicensed injector in Sylmar, Calif.
- Solange Magnano, a model and former Miss Argentina, who died in November 2009 after injected microspheres of PMMA plastic (polymethylmethacrilate) apparently entered her bloodstream and caused a pulmonary embolism.
- Fiordaliza Pichardo of New York, who died of a pulmonary embolism in March 2009 after injections of silicone.
Less hazardous techniques than silicone for enlarging the buttocks include implants or injections of the patient’s own fat, taken from elsewhere on the body.
The buttocks are “one of the worst places for injections,” said plastic surgeon Dr. John Di Saia of San Clemente and Anaheim. Large quantities of material must be injected there to make a difference in a patient’s appearance, but that is risky with fillers such as silicone, because the buttocks contain so many blood vessels, he said.
One recent fatality occurred after a butt injection that did not involve silicone.
Lidvian Zelaya, 35, of Miami in late 2010 died after having liposuction and fat injections in her buttocks, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel reported. Her doctor has been suspended from his practice while the death is analyzed.
Plastic surgeon Dr. Constantino Mendieta of Miami, who specializes in buttock implants, said the popularity of singer-actress Jennifer Lopez in the 1990s boosted the popularity of augmented rears.
“She showed how nice it can look when you’ve got the right curves,” he told BBC News. “It’s not that we never looked at the buttock before then, but it was a taboo subject. She drew attention to it in a good way.”
The February edition of Juicy magazine include the article “Bottoms Up,” which focuses on the popularity of large buttocks, featuring that view of TV personality Kim Kardashian and comments from plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Rodriguez of Baltimore, Md.
Rodriguez specializes in the “Brazilian butt lift” — a procedure that involves injections of the patient’s own fat into the buttocks. The majority of patients signing up for that procedure with him are Latinas or African-American, he says.
Doctors say that an overall cost of up to $10,000 to $14,000 for a Brazilian butt lift is prohibitive for some women, so they turn to low-cost, dangerous silicone injections.
A recent survey by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimated that 806 buttock implants and 3,300 buttock lift procedures were performed last year. That’s triple the number 10 years ago. The average physician’s portion of the bill for those operations was $4,100 to $4,300, the ASPS said.
– http://www.ocregister.com/articles/buttocks-288067-patients-deaths.html
