Breast augmentation is a quite popular cosmetic plastic surgery. It uses breast implants in order to restore breast volume that is lost after excessive weight reduction or pregnancy. It also increases the size of the breasts, which is why the surgery is very popular. With breast augmentation, you can increase the fullness or projection of the intended breasts, improve your body balance, and enhance your confidence. This surgery can also be performed to reconstruct the breasts undergoing injuries or mastectomy. Although this surgery is used to increase breast’s fullness, it cannot be used to improve or correct severely drooping breasts.

Does all breast augmentation include incision?

Yes. There are two kinds of implants used in breast augmentation surgery—the saline and silicone implants. These two implants are made of two different substances, the former is filled with sterile salt water, while the latter is filled with an elastic gel. Any breast augmentation surgery requires an incision to put in the implant, which comes in different shapes, sizes, and textures. The silicon breast implant commonly requires larger incision that saline one. This incision itself can be made on the upper section of the breast, under the nipple, under the breast, or near the umbilical region. With proper post-surgical treatment, this incision should properly heal without affecting your entire health condition.

Why breast augmentation incision is not healing?

Although breast augmentation incision should heal completely within weeks after the performed procedure, some people experience non-healing incision. The incision, hence, might be re-bleeding, re-opening, or keep wounded partially. Realizing this possibility and understanding the incision healing stage will thus be beneficial in preventing non-healing incision from occurring at all and in treating it better, so that it will heal more properly and won’t lead to infection.

Delayed wound healing after a breast augmentation surgery is not very common, because the incision is relatively small and thus, will rarely de-vascularize any breast tissues. Some risk factors that may cause delayed wound healing after breast augmentation surgery include:

• Nicotine use. This can be in a form of nicotine injection or inhaler, or smoking. Smoking inhibits proper flow of nutritious blood into the wound site, which is in fact, essential for wound healing. If you are smoking heavily during your breast augmentation wound healing, the healing process will likely to be delayed.
• Poorly-controlled diabetes. Any wound can be serious with diabetes, including minimal breast augmentation incision. Diabetes that is not controlled well may damage the nerve endings, causing incision wound healing slower than it should be.
• Chemotherapy or radiation therapies. This therapy involve many kinds of medications that influence your body’s natural way of healing the wound.
• Blood-thinning medications. If you are suffering from cardiovascular diseases and consuming steroid and blood-thinning medications, blood clot may be hard to reach. As a result, existing wound site, including the one from breast augmentation will not heal properly. Thus, you might be advised to stop taking these pills temporarily until the incision has healed completely.
• Improper wound care. Another possible reason that causes delayed incision healing after breast augmentation is wound infection. Breast augmentation incision is similar to the other kinds of open wounds, which is going to heal properly with proper treatments, but may lead to infection if not properly handled. Fail to perform proper wound care will aggravate the wound site and thus, causes infection. When an incision is infected, you will not only find out some physical changes to the wound site, but may also experience fever, elevating pain, tightness of the breast, and chills. Doctor’s opinion is important, since the infection may affects the breast health if transmitted to the implant.