People who have cosmetic filler injections in their face should be warned of the risk of a dangerous complication involving blocked arteries that can lead to skin loss and even blindness due to damaged blood flow, say experts.
Researchers used ultrasound to study 100 cases of filler injections that had gone wrong, BBC News reported.
Clinics are now being advised to carry out ultrasounds before giving dermal fillers in the face, to avoid harming any nearby arteries.
Lead researcher Dr Rosa Sigrist says that, although uncommon, such "vascular occlusion" events - where the filler is injected into or too close to blood vessels - can be devastating because they can cause tissue death and facial deformity if not treated.
Dermal fillers are injectable substances, commonly used to target wrinkles and smooth or "rejuvenate" the skin.
Sometimes they are used to contour or shape the nose or lips.
Areas around the nose are particularly risky injection sites, says Dr Sigrist, because nasal blood vessels communicate with some very important parts of the head.
Damage to these vessels can cause severe complications including skin damage, blindness and stroke, she explains.
Dr Sigrist's team, from the University of São Paulo in Brazil, studied filler-related vascular complications in 100 patients across four radiology centers (two in Brazil, one in Colombia and one in Chile), one dermatology centre in the Netherlands and one plastic surgery centre in the US between May 2022 and April 2025.
Her work will be presented at a medical conference - the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America - this week.
In just under half the cases, ultrasound scans showed absent blood flow to small blood vessels that connect superficial arteries to deep ones in the face.
And in a third of cases, blood flow was absent in major blood vessels.
To avoid complications in the first place, she advises clinics to use ultrasound to plan where to inject.
If complications do arise, ultrasound can guide where to treat.
"If injectors are not guided by ultrasound, they treat based on where the clinical findings are and inject blindly," Dr. Sigrist says.
"But if we can see the ultrasound finding, we can target the exact place where the occlusion occurs."
Rather than flooding the area with a drug called hyaluronidase to dissolve the filler, clinicians can do guided injections that use less hyaluronidase and provide better treatment results, she says. Source: https://www.panorama.am/
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