Comment to “Correction of Contour Deformity Using Reverse Abdominoplasty Combined with Mini-Abdominoplasty”

It was a great pleasure to have the opportunity to read the article with title “Correction of Contour Deformity Using Reverse Abdominoplasty Combined with Mini-Abdominoplasty” reported by Yang et al.[1] Authors reported the case of a patient with apparent abdominal wall skin laxity with a compact umbilical area 1 year after liposuction, which was treated with combined reverse abdominoplasty and mini-abdominoplasty, resulting in a satisfactory esthetic outcome. And authors ended up with a following conclusion: “…to our knowledge, this is the first report of combined reverse abdominoplasty and mini-abdominoplasty for the treatment of a characteristic deformity.” Authors have a very interesting and informative article. They also wrote down a very thorough discussion with satisfactory references. They also referred our paper as the reference number 5 as follows: Zienowicz RJ, Karacaoglu E. Augmentation mammaplasty by reverse abdominoplasty (AMBRA). Plast Reconstr Surg 2009;124:166272. doi: 10.1097/PRS.0b013e3181babd02.[2] As it would be clearly seen, we have published a series of 37 cases in our paper with Augmentation Mammaplasty by Reverse Abdominoplasty (AMBRA) technique and we performed full-abdominoplasty in 16 (43%) of cases. It seems to us that authors made unintentional physical error stating that “…to our knowledge, this is the first report of combined reverse abdominoplasty and mini-abdominoplasty for the treatment of a characteristic deformity.” As seen obviously, we performed reverse abdominoplasty with full (more than mini-) abdominoplasty as stated in our article which was published 9 years before the aforementioned article. Author's Reply: Thanks for your attention on our study.[1] We appreciate your questions and opinions. The above comment reported that the reverse abdominoplasty combined with mini (full)-abdomnioplasty have been carried out and reported by other authors before. Thus the statement in our case[1] that “…to our knowledge, this is the first report of combined reverse abdominoplasty and mini-abdominoplasty for the treatment of a characteristic deformity” is unproper. However, in our case, we have made it clear that the patient was a special woman with a characteristic deformity after liposuction. The characteristic deformity owned the feature that “the skin within 2 cm around the umbilicus was in favourable adherence to the underlying fascia, while the rest of the skin was not”. The inherent blood supply around the umbilicus remained well and a regular way of abdominalplasty might be a second time undermining to the residual blood supply. Thus, we tried the reverse abdominoplasty combined with mini-abdomnioplasty to solve the characteristic deformity and got a satisfactory outcome. In the article of Zienowicz el al,[2] such deformity was not mentioned. So this was the first report of utilizing the reverse abdominoplasty combined with mini-abdomnioplasty to solve the characteristic deformity.